Higher Ed Futures: An Exploration

In a speculative workshop we attempted to understand collectively what it means for higher education in the future(s) through discussions and co-creation with our community partners (students, faculties, administrative staffs, and other interested parties). Over the course of 3 hours, we discussed potential changes that institutions of higher education could face in the near, intermediate, and far future.

Workshop

The workshop started by situating participants within a timeline of higher education, connecting past and present events to understand different threads of implications and their own relationship with these events. Participants were then guided to choose an event of interest and discussed this with the whole group. The group then chose to combine two interrelated events to extrapolate further. In this case, the group chose “Blockchain certificate” and “No more tenure in Iowa”. Many different scenarios were brought up, ranging from utopian to dystopian ones—in addition to issues of the present. In the second half of the workshop, the participants chose the area of open-platform higher-ed to dive deeper into the granualities. They created potential future headlines to manifest different scenarios while constructing a deeper narrative. After each exercise, participants were asked to do a personal reflection of the experiences and shared with the groups.

Key Points

The workshop speculated based on two interesting models of higher-ed educations: Open-Format Education and Value-based Learning. Instances of such structure were identified such as corporate partnership, personalized education, academic freedom for both professors and students, etc. Different speculative scenarios were developed such as mega-universities, shorter academic plans, “platform” programs, co-op K-12 collegiate experiences, and various levels of self- organization for students and professors.

• Changing power dynamics in education: negotiation of powers between existing and new decision-makers (market, institution, faculty, student, and others)

• Value-based system: how can we integrate new values with existing structures 

• Confronting equity: futures are usually speculated with the assumption of technological availability, accessibility, and progress. How would this issue be addressed moving forward?

• The monopoly of corporations within the education sphere: for-profit vs. academic integrity/freedom

• Exposure to options: K-12 students would have more exposure to a diversity of options to orient their interests. At the same time, this creates a condition for lifelong learning