George, on his blog, asked “What are your reactions, thoughts, and feelings” to this educational futures scenario. Tried to post my reply in his blog comments, but got a technical error. So here is my blogged reply.
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.
Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (2024). Youth perspectives on three speculative futures for higher education. Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education, 1(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.25619/gv5shv76
Future 1 is an educational future that is dominated by “arrival technologies” and not “emerging technologies”. (https://doi.org/10.21428/e4baedd9.81164b06). As opposed to “emerging technologies“, that have to be consciously adopted, arrival technologies are just there to those who have devices, data and infrastructure. Arrival technologies work seamlessly, 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.
Sine they are cloud-based, arrival technologies work well with strong university brands. OPM’s can use “arrival technologies” 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 educational futures (F1) down here. Arrival technologies have not had as big an impact on all universities. Arrival technologies, if configured for local users in vernacular languages, could offer epistemological benefits to those who have been previously marginalised or disadvantaged. This comment might alludes George’s second scenario, where universities become “hubs of local knowledge and places for community cultural and scientific development”. I’ll have to follow up.
George has a great set of references. Another set of University Futures worth looking are Near Future Teaching from Edinburgh Uni. You might also be interested in looking out for a special issue about “Fiction in Learning, Media and Technology Research”