14 April 2026 - UCISA26 Robin Lupton Reflections
Prior to the conference I was looking forward to networking with other Leaders in HE and getting to know my new team. My visit to the conference was during my second week at ARU, so this was a great opportunity to connect with my team more.
All the sessions were great but here my top talks and takeaways.
- Digital change is cultural change. The tech is the easy part... but technology is useless if it's not supporting your people's needs.
- We need more shared clarity on what lifelong learning really means in practice, but it could be a great way to make learning even more accessible. Lots of potential and an exciting space to watch.
- Shared services are tough, but there are bright spots like Jisc and Norman. Looking forward to learning more about the ongoing discovery for a standard student data model.
- Lots of exciting things are happening with AI but to really leverage it we need a better handle on the Use cases and user needs so it can be implemented in a meaningful way. I'm biased but feels like an iterative user focused product approach could be a good way to start.
- Paul Gallagher and Dieter Kräftner session on “Smarter, faster, leaner AI” from ARU. Again I'm clearly biased but it was great to hear about the exciting stuff they have been doing.
- Sedef Gavaz and Seema Kisnay talk on pivoting from features to outcomes and the importance of solving user problems to add real value. It's a journey I'm excited to be on.
- Learning should be hard. Everything around it should be easy.
- There is still a gap and challenge in recruiting for women in tech and some of this stems from how we advertise our roles. Jake Dovey's talk on what he has been doing in this space was great with good tangible advice.
- Michael Webb's question around should we be designing our University website shop fronts to support students or AI agents who will be serving that content to students was an interesting and scary one.
A final personal highlight was getting to walk along the docks. My mother's side of the family is from Kemi, Finland and when they immigrated to America in the 1890s they stopped in Liverpool before sailing on to America. It must have been wonderfully terrifying. It was nice to see a glimpse of my history.
