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The leading and most-attended event in higher education sector in Poland, focused on strategic and operational university management

EUPRIO-Directors Briefing starts successfully. How can it work to fulfil the complex tasks in a communication department under the new challenges of a digital office? How can colleagues be brought along and motivated? These and other questions were discussed by organisational scientist and digitalisation expert Isabelle M. Welpe from the Technical University of Munich at the 1st EUPRIO Directors Briefing with almost 30 heads of communication departments.

As universities welcomed students back to campuses this autumn, many towns and cities saw a surge of confirmed Covid-19 cases and university communication teams back in crisis mode. Here Nic Mitchell finds out how EUPRIO members from across Europe are meeting the challenges of the ‘new normal’ in the midst of a second wave of the Corona virus.

EUPRIO’s annual conference in Trieste, which was due to open on 30 August, has been postponed until next year due to the Covid-19 pandemic – but its theme of “Science communication: how to engage nowadays” could not have been more relevant.

As universities responded to Covid-19 by moving online, Nic Mitchell looks at key lessons from a webinar on the rapid transformation of big events like open days and graduation ceremonies to the virtual environment and Christine Legrand reports from a French online discussion on communication challenges during and after the corona crisis.

We’ve all had good and bad experiences of continuing to communicate with our students, staff and other stakeholders in the middle of the coronavirus crisis and now is the ideal time to look at lessons learnt since the pandemic shut campuses and forced teaching and virtually everything else online.

Universities in europe and across the world have overcome daunting communication challenges since the covid-19 virus shuttered campuses and forced teaching online – and they face fresh obstacles in navigating to the ‘new normal’.

If the coronavirus has proved one thing, it is the value of timely and trustworthy information from scientists and other experts to policy-makers and the need for effective communication to the public at large.

When was the last time you audited all the social media accounts associated with your university?

Four projects have been approved for the next round of the EUPRIO Mobility Programme (EMP), which supports Europe-wide cooperation and collaboration between higher education communication practitioners across borders to tackle some of the commons issues we all face.