LUMEN 2022 Conference recap

The 8th edition of the LUMEN Conference is now behind us! Over the course of two days – November 22-23, 2022 – nearly 20 panel discussions and presentations were held. LUMEN featured more than 50 speakers from Poland and abroad, both representatives of universities and key higher education institutions, as well as companies, international associations and non-profit organizations.

This year’s edition of the largest conference for leaders in university management was followed by more than 1,200 participants – we are thankful for your participation and all your questions and feedback.

The conference was inaugurated by Prof. Łukasz Sułkowski, President of PCG Poland. Short keynote speeches were also delivered by Justyna Orłowska, Plenipotentiary of the Prime Minister for GovTech, Prof. Jerzy Woźnicki, President of the Board of the Polish Rectors Foundation (PRF), and Prof. Michał Zasada, Vice-Chairman of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland (CRASP) and Rector of the Warsaw University of Life Sciences.

SESSIONS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONFERENCE AND THE AWARDS GALA

The proceedings began with a presentation by the National Information Processing Institute. Presentation proved how, with the help of analytics, it is possible to transform huge sets of data collected for evaluation purposes into knowledge that can be valuable to all stakeholders – not only the Ministry of Education and Science, but also the universities themselves, scientists and society. We also learned about the state of Polish higher education in the light of the analysis of POL-on data.

Staying on the topic of evaluation, we smoothly moved on to the first panel discussion, which featured the leaders of the key institutions of Polish HEI sector, including CRASP, PRF, Main Council of Science and Higher Education, Committee for Scientific Evaluation, and the Foundation for Polish Science. The leaders evaluated the course of the overall process from the perspective of the institutions they represented. They shared opinions and conclusions from the completed evaluation, as well as suggestions for desirable changes in the ongoing period of the next evaluation.

Tha panel was followed by a debate on digital university management, aimed at analyzing the strategies of Polish universities in digital transformation processes and identifying good practices. We looked at the issue from different perspectives, represented by the guests of the session: the state (Ministry of Education and Science), the rectors of exemplary digitized universities (Bialystok University of Technology and Kozminski University), and an IT company (Microsoft). The debate was moderated by Prof. Łukasz Sułkowski, President of PCG Poland. For those interested in this topic, we recommend the Professor’s book Managing the Digital University. Paradigms, Leadership, and Organization, that will published by Routledge in March 2023.

The next discussion brought us into the world of international rankings. Phil Baty, Chief Knowledge Officer at Times Higher Education, spoke with the rectors of the three highest ranked Polish universities in THE World University Rankings – Wroclaw Medical University, University of Warsaw and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The speakers reviewed the opportunities and challenges facing universities on their way to the top tiers of the world rankings, and shared their experiences and tips related to participation in THE World University Rankings.

The spotlight of LUMEN 2022 was the Awards Gala for the leaders of universities ranked in THE World University Rankings 2023, the latest edition of the world’s most prestigious and recognizable ranking of higher education institutions. The awards were presented by Phil Baty, Chief Knowledge Officer at Times Higher Education, and Prof. Łukasz Sułkowski, President of PCG Poland.

The list of awarded universities is given in the summary of the Gala available here:

Summary of THE World University Rankings 2023 Awards Gala at the 8th LUMEN 2022 Conference.

The ceremony was preceded by a discussion of the methodology and results of the ranking (with particular emphasis on Polish universities) by Times Higher Education experts.

SESSIONS OF THE SECOND DAY OF THE CONFERENCE

The second day of LUMEN began with a panel on European Universities. We learned the perspective of both experienced institutions and those just starting out within these international networks of universities.

We continued the topic of internationalization on the next session, in which we reflected on the visibility of Polish science and research on the international arena. Problems in this area were identified at the levels of the researcher, the university, as well as national and global levels. The panelists presented good practices for promoting scientific achievements and potential strategic solutions.

The following session explored development opportunities for universities available with the EU funds in the 2021-2027 financial perspective – most likely the last one in which universities will be able to obtain funds for informatization. The speakers explained what kind of support universities can count on in the new projects, what the total pool of funds for higher education is, and when these funds will flow to beneficiaries.

The other three sessions focused on new technologies and specific IT solutions for universities. One of the debates was devoted to low-code technology, which allows applications to be built and processes to be digitized visually, without any knowledge of programming languages. As Gartner predicts, by 2025 as much as 70% of new applications will be built using low-code. Not surprisingly, the panelists responded positively to the question posed in the panel’s title – yes, low-code technology can be a recipe for rising costs of IT products and services for universities as well.

The two subsequent panels concerned the sphere of education. We talked about modern forms of education and their effectiveness with representatives of universities leading the way in innovative didactics and companies supporting e-learning. We listened to the WSB Academy’s experience in conducting courses in cooperation with business, and explored the opportunities and challenges of microcredentials and MOOCs.

The last session allowed us to learn about the experiences of leading universities – Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Medical University of Bialystok and University of Illinois Chicago – in using Learning Management Systems. EDUCAUSE reports that in the U.S. as many as 99% of universities use LMS systems, and they are also becoming more common in Poland. A frequent choice is the Blackboard Learn Ultra solution. Using examples from their own universities, the speakers talked about how the implementation of such platform changes the teaching process.

PRESENTATIONS

The LUMEN 2022 program included not only various debates, but also short presentations.

Ministry of Education and Science unveiled the concept of the Edukacja.gov.pl portal, which goal is to present a whole cross-section of information about the Polish education system on all levels from primary to higher education.

NASK talked about the EZD RP project (an electronic document management system for public institutions) in the context of the digital transformation of Polish universities and how it will affect the operations of university administration. Wolters Kluwer, in turn, presented the results of a survey conducted jointly with PRF among chancellors on tools supporting university management.

For our part, we presented the Sciencecloud system – a solution for collecting, analyzing and reporting research output in accordance with the guidelines of the Ministry of Education and Science. We also summarized our cooperation with WEBCON and presented the tool we are implementing at universities as a WEBCON Premium Partner, the WEBCON BPS low-code platform. In the presentation, we used an example of specific processes related to a student’s documentation.

Our experts also reviewed two case studies: the launch of a scientific repository based on DSpace 7 in a service model, and the use of Inspera Assessment, a secure online exam solution, by Kozminski University.

Video recordings from this year’s LUMEN are available on our website and our YouTube channel.

LUMEN 2022 Conference was organized by PCG Academia, Times Higher Education and Polish Rectors Foundation.

The conference was held under the honorary patronage of Minister of Education and Science. The conference was also covered by the patronages of President of CRASP, Polish Accreditation Committee, National Information Processing Institute, NASK, and Polish Confederation Lewiatan. Media patronage was provided by EUPRIO, Academic Forum and the PROM Association.

LUMEN Partners were Anthology, Microsoft, Elsevier, euroCRIS, LYRASIS, WEBCON, Wolters Kluwer, and Inspera.