Campus by Times Higher Education

Campus podcast: The complex factors that drive students’ sense of belonging

A sense of belonging is particularly valuable in higher education, where feeling valued, respected and part of a community are connected to students’ academic achievement, retention and well-being. But belonging resists clear definition, both what it is and how it relates to other concepts such as inclusion and mattering. This is especially true in a post-pandemic world, where online learning and the digital transformation have blurred the boundaries of university life.

For this episode of the Campus podcast, we speak to Karen Gravett, who is an associate professor in higher education and associate head of research in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey. Her research covers belonging, digital education, student engagement, relational pedagogies and literacy practices. As part of the Belonging to and beyond the Digital university project, Karen (working with Rola Ajjawi of Deakin University and Sarah O’Shea from Charles Sturt University) asked students what belonging means to them, and in this conversation she shares insights into post-Covid student life and why elements such as curation, safety, non-belonging and connection to an academic discipline are powerful drivers of belonging.

You'll find more advice and insight on how to build belonging at your higher education institution in our latest spotlight guide.

Campus podcast: The secrets of effective policy engagement - from two academics who have worked in government

Hear from two academic policy experts, one in the UK and one in the US, who discuss the most effective ways that researchers can share their expertise with politicians and civil servants.

We speak to:

Michael Sanders is a professor of public policy at Kings College London and director of the School for Government. In addition to his academic career, he has worked in government as chief scientist on the Behavioural Insights Team and was the founding chief executive of What Works for Children’s Social Care.

David Garcia is a professor with Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Prior to joining ASU, he helped found the Arizona Center for Public Policy - ThinkAZ, and he was worked as an associate superintendent and a director of research and policy with Arizona Department of Education. He is also a former legislative staffer with the Arizona State Senate and was the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor of Arizona.

For more advice and insight on how best to engage policymakers with your research, take a look at our latest spotlight: An academics' guide to policy impact.

Campus podcast: Why internationalisation must remain a cornerstone of higher education

Hear why an international approach to higher education research and teaching is vital to building a better future and solving global challenges.

We speak to two academic experts to learn about effective institutional strategies to support internationalisation but also what key barriers prevent a more global academy.

Lily Kong is president of Singapore Management University. She is the first women to lead an institute of higher education in Singapore. She took the helm in 2019 after three years as provost, and prior to this she held senior management roles at the National University of Singapore.

Manuel Barcia is the University of Bath’s pro vice-chancellor (global) after moving from the University of Leeds in May 2025, where he was dean for global engagement and chair of global history in the School of History.

For more advice and insight on this topic, browse our spotlight guide to teaching and researching across borders.

Campus podcast: How to look after yourself in higher education

For this episode, we asked academics and university staff from around the world to share their own strategies for staying positive, healthy and maintaining balance in a sector in which stress and overwork are commonplace. At a time when higher education feels under attack in many countries, in more ways than one, it is important for those working in the sector to find coping strategies that work for them and build collective support.

Thank you to all who contributed their personal wisdom:

• Lucas Lixinski is a law professor and associate dean at UNSW Sydney, which he joined after completing a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Texas School of Law.
• Maha Bali is a professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at The American University in Cairo (AUC). 
• Doune Macdonald is an emerita professor at the University of Queensland and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.
• Debbie Riby is a professor of developmental psychology and associate pro-vice chancellor for postgraduate research students at Durham University
• Bhawana Shrestha is a research fellow at the Learning Institute for Future Excellence at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.
• Chris Wright is a senior lecturer and co-ordinator of the Drawing Centre at De Montfort University.
• Chin Moi Chow is an associate professor of sleep and well-being in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.
• Pippa Caterall is a professor of history and policy at the University of Westminster.
• Patrice Sewou is an associate professor of learning and teaching and the director of the Centre for the Advancement of Racial Equality at the University of Northampton.
• Aster Cosmos is a learning designer at Monash University.

For more insight and advice on protecting the well-being of those working and studying in universities, take a look at our latest spotlight guide on making mental health a priority in higher education.

Campus podcast: How to achieve research excellence – and protect it

The delivery of quality research is central to the mission of most universities. But there is more to research excellence than headline-grabbing “ground-breaking” discoveries.

This podcast episode explores what good research looks like, how it can be supported at an institutional level, and what feeds into a healthy research ecosystem that enables robust studies of all types, at all stages to be carried out and knowledge advanced.

We also delve into research security to find out how such scholarly work can be protected from misuse or being weaponised amid ever-changing geopolitical power struggles.

You will hear from:

• Marcus Munafò, who is currently associate pro vice-chancellor for research culture and professor of biological psychology at the University of Bristol, but will, in May, take up the post of deputy vice-chancellor and provost at the University of Bath. He is co-founder of the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) and leads a major project funded by Research England to accelerate the uptake of open research practices across UK higher education sector.
• Jacqueline Littlewood, director of research security at the University of Alberta in Canada. She took up this role leading the university’s safeguarding research office in 2023 after a 20-year career in government as a policy analyst and adviser, including working with Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

For more advice on this topic, check out our resources offering insight on delivering top quality research, including a spotlight collection on how to demonstrate research excellence.

Campus podcast: The tricky relationship between assessment and learning

Assessment is a cornerstone of most modern education systems, and yet is it strictly necessary? If it is, what purpose should it serve and, thus, how should it be designed and delivered?

In seeking to answer these questions, we put assessment under examination. In this podcast episode, the nature of institutionalised education, how assessment can better serve learning, the impact of grading, and compliance all come under scrutiny.

We speak to:

Susan D. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. An award-winning author and educator, she has written and edited 10 books including a trilogy critiquing the way university teaching is delivered with the latest, Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, coming out in 2024.

Catherine Wehlburg is president of Athens State University and president of the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE).

Josh Eyler is director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and clinical assistant professor of teacher education at the University of Mississippi. He has written highly regarded books on the science of learning with his latest, Failing our Future: How Grades Harm Students and What We Can Do about It, published in 2024.

More insight on assessment in higher education can be found in these Campus spotlight guides: 

• The evolution of authentic assessment
• AI and assessment in higher education
• The great assessment rethink

Campus podcast: Why we need interdisciplinarity in teaching and research

Complex problems cannot be solved if examined only through a narrow lens. Enter interdisciplinarity. It is now widely accepted that drawing on varied expertise and perspectives is the only way we can understand and tackle many of the most challenging issues we face, as individuals and as a species.

So, there is a growing movement towards more cross-disciplinary working in higher education, but it faces challenges. Interdisciplinarity requires a shift of mindset in an academy built upon clear disciplinary distinctions and must compete for space in already overcrowded curricula.

For this episode, we speak to Gabriele Bammer and Kate Crawford to find out why interdisciplinary research and teaching are so important and how these leading scholars are encouraging more academics and students to break out of traditional academic silos.

Gabriele Bammer is a professor of integration and implementation sciences (i2S) at the Australian National University. She is author of several books including ‘Disciplining Interdisciplinarity’ and is inaugural president of the Global Alliance for Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. To support progress in interdisciplinarity around the world, she runs the Integration and Implementation Insights blog and repository of theory, methods and tools underpinning i2S. Gabriele has held visiting appointments at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

Kate Crawford is an international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence who has advised policymakers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament on AI, and currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural visiting chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, reveals the extractive nature of this technology while her creative collaborations such as Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler and Excavating AI with Trevor Paglen explore the complex processes behind each human-AI interaction, showing the material and human costs. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500-2025, opened in Milan, November 2023 and won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology.

More advice and insight can be found in our latest Campus spotlight guide: A focus on interdisciplinarity in teaching.

Campus: Pros and cons of AI in higher education

How should universities manage the rapid uptake of artificial intelligence across all aspects of higher education? We talk to three experts about AI’s impact on teaching, governance and the environment. 

These interviews – with a researcher, a teaching expert and a pro vice-chancellor for AI – share practical advice, break down key considerations, and offer reasons for vigilance and optimism. 

We talk to:

• Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and a cooperating faculty member in the computer science and engineering department at the University of California, Riverside, whose article “Making AI less ‘thirsty’: uncovering and addressing the secret water footprint of AI models”, co-written with Pengfei Li and Jianyi Yang, also from UC Riverside, and Mohammad A. Islam of UT Arlington, has drawn attention to water consumption of AI data centres
• José Bowen, an author and academic who co-wrote Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) 
• Shushma Patel, pro vice-chancellor for artificial intelligence at De Montfort University in the UK. 

For more Campus resources on this topic, see our spotlight guide Bringing GenAI into university teaching.

Campus: A brighter future for academic publishing

Learn about new models in academic publishing that could better serve academia by helping scholars get their work into the public sphere more readily, removing financial barriers for authors and readers and underpinning better research practices.

We speak to two academics about the challenges associated with the dominant commercial academic publishing model and how they are seeking more effective ways to enable researchers to disseminate knowledge.

Paul Ayris is pro-vice provost for library services at University College London and chief executive of UCL Press which he founded 10 years ago as the UK’s first fully open access university press. The press produces a range of open access monographs and edited collections, student textbooks and academics journals and is now home to UCL Open Environment, the only multidisciplinary open science journal focused on all environment related topics.

Philipp Koellinger is a professor in social science genetics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-founder and CEO of a tech start-up DeSci Labs which hosts DeSci Publish, a pre-print network where scientific research is published, validated, and curated without paywalls or publication charges.

Campus: The benefits of citizen science and community-engaged research

Citizen science, in which researchers work alongside members of the public to collect or analyse data, brings multiple benefits, extending the capabilities of research teams and aiding public engagement. But there are still sceptics who question its validity as a research model. Find out why concerns are often misplaced and hear some of the ways enthusiastic amateurs have helped advance human knowledge.

On the broader question of public impact, hear how universities could provide a framework that supports academics to carry out more community-engaged research, designed to serve the public good.

On this episode, we talk to:

Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, presenter on the BBC’s The Sky at Night program, author and co-founder of citizen science platform Zooniverse. He explains how his interest in citizen science was sparked and why he believes it is such an effective model.

Neeli Bendapudi, president of Penn State – Pennsylvania State University – discusses a new coalition of university leaders from across the US and Canada who are working with funders, government agencies and others to develop a roadmap for the future community-engaged, public-impact research.

For more insight into the global higher education sector, visit Campus.