Over the past six months or so, I’ve been working with my great colleagues Siân Bayne and Michael Gallagher on a new set of resources for working with higher education futures.
Speculative Futures for Higher Education includes 8 scenarios, 8 tarot cards and 8 short stories builds on the 2017–19 Near Future Teaching project, which used design-based methodologies to co-create
a vision for the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Two short trend-mapping reviews were done as part of that project, and we returned to these reviews in 2022 to update them, identifying the 8 scenarios presented in this new resource.
In addition to the 8 scenarios, the resource also includes 8 very short stories, written to evoke one form of the future proposed in each scenario.
The eight scenarios are:
- Extinction-era universities
- AI academy
- The universal university
- Extreme unbundling
- Justice-driven innovation
- Return to the ivory tower
- The university of ennui
- Enhanced enhancement
All the materials and the scenario and story texts are available on the Centre web site, free to download and reuse with attribution.
