2020 was a momentous year for higher education in Ireland, with a new government department created in the midst of a global pandemic. Events at home, not least the revised approach to the Leaving Cert exams, produced their own upheaval. This article offers an overview and summary analysis of the main events and casts an eye to future trends.

2020 saw the creation of a new, dedicated Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation, and Science. We report and reflect on the department’s inception, focus, initial steps, and future promise.

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged universities as never before. This article reflects on the university experience of dealing with the pandemic, and considers what the permanent impact on the higher education sector might be.

Ulster University’s efforts in educational and research collaboration are central to bridging Brexit. The university is part of a formal cross-border further education and higher education cluster, whose founding principle is to enable learning pathways at tertiary level in response to current and future challenges for the region. This article outlines those pathways and shows the strategic importance of cross-border collaboration.

This article offers ideas on how to engage with online students on a taught MA programme. In the wake of Covid-19, online engagement has become a critical part of online delivery and facilitation, with many third-level courses suddenly having to adapt to an online offering.

The social engagement of students in higher education leads to the development of a sense of belonging, resulting in greater student retention. Internationally, disabled students have been found to face additional barriers to their social engagement. This article presents the author’s PhD research on the social engagement experiences of disabled students in higher education in Ireland. It summarises the findings and reflects on their significance in the new Covid-19 environment.

This article explores how Hibernia College, as a higher education institution, adapted to full-time online teaching, learning, and assessment during Covid-19. It reflects on changing pedagogies and the formation of a reimagined identity for teacher educators.

Travellers’ growing educational ambition has emerged despite multigenerational discrimination and disadvantage. Covid-19-related strategies have exposed the fragility of this progress and threaten to reverse it, creating a lost education generation. Higher education institutions must engage with Traveller communities and support current and potential Traveller students. The power of community engagement has been shown in recent events, where Traveller students and organisations voiced their concerns and called for change to rights-based policies and practice.

This article looks at what kind of research is being carried out at present and what ethical issues need to be considered in doing research in a pandemic. It focuses on the interview as a method of data collection and the inherent challenges that Covid-19 presents for researchers.

A strong culture of quality that promotes sustainable stakeholder engagement ultimately underpins quality resilience, that is, the ability of our quality frameworks to support dynamic environments in times of challenge and uncertainty. This article suggests areas for providers to focus on as they continue to develop the capacity of their QA frameworks to support the delivery of blended learning.

Almost 45,000 third-level students took part in this year’s Irish Survey of Student Engagement. The survey report, published in November 2020, provides a timely snapshot of student experiences immediately before the sweeping changes introduced as a result of Covid-19. This article presents the main findings of the survey.