King's College London

Last week, King’s Digital hosted King’s inaugural Festival of Online Education. The event marked a decade since King’s launched its first fully online master’s programme.

Now, King’s offers 20 online postgraduate programmes with over 4,500 students studying across 150+ countries.

Spanning two days, the festival began in-person on Strand Campus where delegates from across the UK and overseas came together to better understand how King’s develops online programmes with a student-first mindset.

The festival was joined by representatives from King's PLuS Alliance, a partnership between King’s College London (KCL), the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia and Arizona State University (ASU) in America.

The first session of the day was a panel discussion between the Vice Chancellors and Presidents of UNSW, Attila Brungs, ASU, Michael Crow and KCL, Shitij Kapur. As leaders of three pioneering universities in the online learning space, they shared their reflections on the role of distance learning both now and in the future.

Whilst all three universities are delivering online education at a different pace and scale, the whole panel could agree that online education is here to stay. They also emphasised the importance of the partnership and collaboration when developing remote learning for a global audience.

Later in the day, the festival heard from Casey Evans, Chief Operating Officer for EdPlus at ASU, Liz Smith, Director of Learning Experience at UNSW and ‘Funmi Olonisakin, King’s Vice-President (International Engagement & Service) for a conversation on the global challenges and opportunities of online learning.  

King’s Digital looks forward to continuing these partnerships and the team has begun monthly engagement webinars with EdPlus at ASU to share learnings, offer staff opportunities to upskill and to continue building relationships both individually and at scale. 

There was then an in-person by six of online students who travelled from all four corners of the globe to be at King’s inaugural Festival of Online Education. Concluding the first day with testimonials from current students highlighted the importance of creating accessible online education which is career enhancing and globally minded.

Day two of the festival went online with the King’s Digital team and academic staff diving deep into their specialisms across 19 online sessions throughout the day which saw over 1,000 registrations.