When I ask you to think of innovation in higher education, chances are, you are visualising large university classrooms and laboratories, and fairly so. These are the places where most present-day researchers and experienced professionals began their journey. This is where ideas sprout and innovation begins.
But there is a quieter and a faster-moving space that presently exists in this arena. This is where some of the important conversations and discussions are taking place. If you are someone who works in education, studies its systems or simply cares about where it is headed, the 10 conferences listed in this blog are worth knowing about.
1. SXSW EDU (Austin, Texas) March 9-12, 2026
Most people associate SXSW with music and film. The education side of this iconic festival, however, has grown into a serious forum for looking at learning from the ground up. SXSW EDU brings together teachers, founders, investors and policymakers for close to 300 sessions and across 12 thematic tracks.
The sessions cover everything from early childhood development to workforce readiness, and the conversation tends to be frank in a way that more formal academic conferences rarely are. One of its most distinctive features is that it does not separate practitioners from theorists. A high school teacher and a venture capitalist can find themselves in the same breakout session, and that collision of perspectives is precisely what makes it useful.
2. ASU+GSV Summit (San Diego, California) April 12-15, 2026
The ASU+GSV Summit has become one of the most closely watched gatherings in global education and for a specific reason. It sits at the intersection of learning and investment. Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley co-host an event that attracts institutional leaders alongside the entrepreneurs and funders who are actively building the next generation of educational tools and platforms.
If you want to understand which direction edtech investment is flowing, this is the room to be in. The summit does not shy away from big, uncomfortable questions about access and equity either, which keeps the conversation anchored in something real even as the capital discussions heat up.
3. EduTECH (Australia) June 3-4, 2026
For those based in the Australian region, EduTECH is the largest education technology conference, and it draws a truly international crowd of experts. This is a 2-day long event wherein 300+ speakers from around the globe come together. Happening in the city of Sydney in Australia, the conference will host conversations that cut across educational sectors in a way that is rare and valuable.
The Australian education system has been quietly ahead of the curve on several fronts, particularly in online delivery and international student engagement, and EduTECH is proof of this.
4. EDUCAUSE Annual Conference (Colorado, USA) Sept 29- Oct 6, 2026
EDUCAUSE is the go-to gathering for higher education technology professionals in the United States and it has been for decades. The annual conference draws chief information officers, IT directors and academic technologists from hundreds of colleges and universities.
This year’s event is set to take place in the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. What makes EDUCAUSE particularly important right now is its focus on data governance, cybersecurity and the institutional challenges of integrating AI into university systems. These are not the most appealing topics, but they are the ones that determine whether innovation actually sticks at a large institution.
5. Learning and the Brain Foundation Winter Conference (San Francisco, USA) February 13-15, 2026
Not every important education conference is primarily about technology. The Learning and the Brain Foundation runs a series of events each year that bring cognitive scientists and neuroscientists into direct conversation with educators.
The premise is simple: if we understand more about how the human brain actually learns, we should be building educational systems around that knowledge rather than around historical convention.
6. QS Higher Education Summit International (Bali, Indonesia) November 3-5, 2026
QS, best known for its global university rankings, runs a higher education summit that draws university presidents, vice-chancellors and senior administrators from institutions across the world.
Recent editions have focused heavily on the geopolitics of higher education, the sustainability of international student recruitment models and the way rankings themselves shape institutional behaviour in ways that are not always positive. The honest self-examination that sometimes surfaces in these sessions is more valuable than the networking and that is saying something.
7. Online Learning Consortium Accelerate (Florida, USA) November 17-20, 2026
The Online Learning Consortium’s annual conference, known as OLC Accelerate, has shifted from a niche gathering of distance education specialists to one of the most relevant events in higher education broadly. The pandemic helped garner more interest in online and hybrid learning by several years and OLC Accelerate has been one of these conferences that picked up in relevance as a result.
The conference is particularly strong on quality standards for online instruction. This is a conversation that the sector desperately needs given how much variation exists in what online education actually delivers to students.
8. WISE Summit (Doha, Qatar) November 24-25, 2026
The World Innovation Summit for Education, hosted by the Qatar Foundation, is one of the few major education conferences that places the Global South at the centre of its agenda rather than the margins. It also supports educators by honoring them with the ‘WISE Prize for Education’.
WISE brings together education leaders from regions that are often absent from the conversations happening in San Diego or Austin and the effect is a noticeably different set of priorities. The summit has also developed a strong research publication arm referred to as the ‘WISE Edtech Accelerator’, which means the conversations that happen in Doha tend to have a longer life than the conference itself.
9. Times Higher Education World Academic Summit (Virtual) September 1-2, 2026
This year’s virtual summit is set to happen on September 1st and 2nd. The theme for the year is ‘A new dawn for higher education?’
Speakers from around the globe are set to address the following questions as part of the virtual summit:
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- Is the pandemic and the shift to a more digitally-based world changing the value of “place” for higher education institutions?
- Does this create a new opportunity for institutions in the Global South to redefine their public value and research impact, and challenge real or perceived power imbalances within international alliances, partnerships and scholarship programmes?
- Has the pandemic accelerated trends that were already clear and expected for higher education institutions or have we moved into uncharted territory?
10. International Conference on Leadership and Management in Higher Education (Helsinki, Finland) March 12-13, 2026
The International Conference on Leadership and Management in Higher Education holds an annual conference that is, by most measures, one of the largest gatherings of education practitioners, thought leaders and managerial professionals in the region.
The conference is currently open for paper submissions across disciplines like leadership, management and higher education.
Why These Conferences Matter
Higher education is at a genuinely uncertain point. The questions about artificial intelligence, equity, cost and purpose are not going away and they are getting harder to answer from within any single institution. These conferences are where the people who are trying to answer those questions gather occasionally to arrive at something that revolutionizes and fundamentally alters the way the rest of the sector operates.
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