In a recent paper* we describe three education scenarios and ask youth to respond to them. Positioned in 2033, these futures represent three distinct possibilities for what education could look like in a decade. I’m curious what others think about them, and I’ll post one per day here, as my “back to school return to reviving this blog.” What are your reactions, thoughts, and feelings to this one? I’d love to know!
Future 1: The year is 2033. In the decade following the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education has increasingly become driven by collecting and analyzing vast amounts of student data, such as tracking student time online, physiological data, employment rates, etc. Learners attending public colleges and universities primarily pursue technical skills associated with a few streams of programs, including computer programming (such as the development of Artificial Intelligence and green technology), health, economics, finance, and business. The arts, social sciences, and humanities are no longer publicly funded. Learners can pursue such programs in expensive private universities, but only a few can afford them.
This is a future in which technical and business education dominates. This is the scenario in which higher education is almost totally oriented towards economic demands and expectations. We modeled this scenario after work in the literature which emphasizes futures in which the arts and humanities decline due to their lack of economic practicality. In such examples, the survival and growth of higher education heavily features future labor as a key indicator of institutional success, including meeting demands for skilled technologists and finance workers. Additionally, surveillance technologies are further integrated into institutional apparatuses, with data being a key management tool of student learning and outcomes. Already a concern in education at all levels, a number of education scholars have speculated about the risks of increasing use of these types of education technologies, many suggesting negative outcomes resulting from it.
* published in the the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital education (see a review by Tony Bates).
Derek Moore
Hello George. This looks like an educational future that is dominated by “arrival technologies” and not “emerging technologies”. (See https://doi.org/10.21428/e4baedd9.81164b06). As opposed to emerging technologies, that have to be consciously adopted, arrival technologies are just there. They are seamless, data driven and the quantification, and trackability make them an extremely attractive option to heads and administrators and those ed techies who think that these features are useful as evidence. They are also cloud-based, so those with the strongest brand in the global north can use arrival tech to create a global reach (with a large number of international students subsidising declining local enrollments). . Those of us who have been in the ed tech business for long enough will recognise the inevitable hype cycle and wonder when we will move from the peak of inflated expectations through the trough of disillusionment and onto the plateau of productivity. This old-school approach of waiting for the hype cycle to follow its course, might not work this time. The harms that arrival technologies might inflict on cognitive development, the teaching profession, knowledge and the environment (to list a few) are becoming very clear. I am answering this question from South Africa, and have a slightly different perspective on Ai down here. Once a corpus of text has been built in vernacular languages. AI can do rudimentary translations. Multi lingual resources are needed. Vernacular language speakers can contribute indigenous knowledge to Wikipedia and broaden access to knowledge, and contribute to the corpus of text. Yes, the above-mentioned harms still remain. But Ai here offers clearer benefits to those who have been previously marginalised or disadvantaged. This I think alludes to your second scenario. Another set of university futures worth looking are from Edinburgh Uni (https://www.nearfutureteaching.ed.ac.uk/). Perhaps I missed them in the references?
George Veletsianos
Thanks for these thoughts, Derek! There’s quite a lot of education futures work happening, some speculative, like the one you highlighted, some fiction-based, with LMT and PDSE offerring friendly homes for that work, and also quite a bit which predates these efforts (e.g., the work of Kerry Facer comes to mind).
Derek Moore
Only a pleasure George, and thanks for the recommendation. Always appreciate a new perspective. Am looking at “Sociodigital futures of education: reparations, sovereignty, care, and democratisation” Much appreciated