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The HEA Education for Sustainable Development Spotlight Series 2025: Case Studies Compendium brings together 115 case studies from higher education institutions across Ireland. It showcases how universities and colleges are integrating sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals into teaching, research, curriculum design, assessment practices and community engagement. It offers a comprehensive picture of national ESD activity and provides an accessible resource for educators and policymakers seeking examples of practice-based innovation.

The report – Generative AI in Higher Education Teaching and Learning: Sectoral Perspectives – was commissioned as part of the Higher Education Authority’s evidence-led approach to policy development.

The report captures the views of staff, students, and leaders across the Irish higher education system on the opportunities and challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

It brings together insights from ten thematic focus groups and a leadership summit, involving over 80 participants from across Ireland’s higher education institutions, alongside student representatives and sectoral stakeholders.

The Higher Education Authority (HEA) is developing a National Professional Recognition Framework for Teaching and Learning to support the recognition of teaching excellence across the sector. The framework builds on the Professional Development Framework (2016) and aims to provide clear, nationally agreed benchmarks for effective teaching practice. It will help inform career development, support institutional processes, and promote a shared understanding of teaching quality in Irish higher education.

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the 2025 Expert Group review of the Irish National Framework for Student Success in Higher Education. Commissioned by the HEA, it explores how the framework and accompanying toolkit have been engaged with across the sector and outlines a renewed vision for student success that is inclusive, strategic, and evidence-informed.

Since March 2020 higher education has experienced one of the most disruptive phases in its recent history. In a sector typified by considered, researched and incremental change, overnight everyone began emergency remote teaching, learning and assessing. The dramatic shift resulted in positives and negatives, and posed a series of questions for students, staff and other stakeholders. Though still living through the pandemic, in March 2021 fifteen partners from a range of stakeholders across the sector agreed to work together to answer one shared persistent and urgent question: In the context of Covid-19, what have we learnt and what does it mean for the future of teaching and learning in Irish higher education?

Guiding Framework for Embedding Student Success
The National Forum has developed this one-page guiding framework to inform conversations at institutional level in the development of approaches to embedding student success. The framework identifies three key pillars…
INDEx Survey: Final Summary Report

This INDEx Survey Final Summary Report outlines how INDEx Survey findings provided a source of evidence for the initial response to the COVID crisis, have supported data-informed decision-making in multiple ways, and represent an important baseline of pre-COVID teaching, learning and digital experience.

How to Choose an Open Licence

How to Choose an Open Licence is the second guide in the National Forum OER/OEP Series: Open Educational Resources and Open Educational Practices. The first guide in the series was the National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit, published in 2019.

The 40 sources summarised in this document each have an explicit focus on impact and provide useful insights for those wishing to explore the topic. The majority of sources focus on teaching and learning impact in a higher education context. A small number focus on impact in other contexts (research or post- primary contexts) and these were included due to their potential relevance to those interested in higher education teaching and learning impact.

The National Forum Open Licensing Toolkit outlines the National Forum’s commitment to open licensing, which enables the creation and sharing of open educational resources. The toolkit provides a detailed description…