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Near Future Teaching: building a collective vision for digital education
Siân Bayne, University of Edinburgh, UK
64 PGT programmes online, c.3,000 distance postgraduate students
35 MOOCs (Coursera, Futurelearn, EdX), c.3m MOOC learners
commitment to growth in distance education
a history of strategic investment and leadership
Digital Education at Edinburgh
Futures Studies
Futures studies is the systematic study of possible, probable and preferable futures including the worldviews and myths that underlie each future.
In the last fifty or so years, the study of the future has moved from predicting the future to mapping alternative futures to shaping desired futures.
Inayatullah, Sohail (2013) Futures Studies: Theories and Methods. Online.
What futurists can do is to facilitate the development and application of individual, organizational and collective foresight.
One result of good foresight work is a well-developed decision context embracing aspects of past, present and possible futures.
Slaughter, R. (1996) The knowledge base of futures studies as an evolving process. Futures. 28:9.
1. is longer-term than ‘planning’ (from five to fifty years)
2. is committed to authentic alternative futures where each scenario is fundamentally
different from the other
3. is more participatory, in that it attempts to include all types of stakeholders instead
of only powerbrokers
4. consciously uses different ways of knowing
5. sees the futures process being as important as the elegance of the final strategic
plan itself
6. action-oriented, more concerned with creating the future than simply predicting it
Adapted from: Inayatullah, Sohail (2013) Futures Studies: Theories and Methods. Online.
EdTech:competing futures for higher education
“As a technological project based on a particular sociotechnical imaginary, IBM’s Smarter Education ambitions exemplify its wider aspirations to conceive citizens computationally in terms of their neurobiological malleability and amenability to algorithmic optimization.”Williamson, Ben (2016) Computing brains: learning algorithms and neurocomputation in the smart city. Information, Communication and Society
‘Smart’ classrooms
Ienca, M. and Andorno, R. (2017) Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13:5
After analysing the relationship between neuroscience and human rights, we identify four new rights that may become of great relevance in the coming decades: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.
Universities: futures work in learning and teaching
Rule 1: We are teaching and learning focused *and* institutionally committed
Rule 2: What we talk about here is institutionally/nationally agnostic
Rule 3: You are in the room with the decision makers. What we decide is critical to the future of our institutions. You are the institution
Rule 4: Despite the chatter, all the tech ‘works’ – the digital is here, we are digital institutions. Digital is not the innovation.
Rule 5: We are here to build not smash
Rule 6: You moan (rehearse systemic reasons why you can’t effect change – see Rule 3), you get no beer (wine, juice, love, peace, etc)
from ‘alumni to populi’ –from 4 years 18-22 to 6 years across a lifetime
from 4 class years to 6 years personalised – ‘calibrate’, ‘elevate’, ‘activate’
dissolution of disciplines in favour of ‘teaching hubs’ for particular skills
from ‘majors to missions’ – from disciplines to global ‘impact labs’
Designing the future of digital education at Edinburgh
Facer, K. and Sandford, R. (2010) The next 25 years?: future scenarios and future directions for education and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. 26.
Principle 1: educational futures work should aim to challenge assumptions rather than present definitive predictions
Principle 2: the future is not determined by its technologies
Principle 3: thinking about the future always involves values and politics
Principle 4: education has a range of responsibilities that need to be reflected into visions of its future
1 Foresight:Taking the community pulseReviews and projections (scientific/technical; educational/social)
2 Scenario development:Scoping plausible future worldsDesigning educational futures for each
3 Testing:Student panelAcademic expert panelChildren’s panel
4 Surfacing challenges, insights and recommendations
5 Translation into policy and action
We are here!
Outputs
Co-produced values- and evidence-based position on futures for:Investment in (educational) technologyInvestment in people/cultureNature and development of future curriculum
Taking the community pulse
Think tank for Vet Students
Dr Jeremy Knox
Future Teaching Manifesto
Teachers should be educated better to better educate us. | The
future must be as inclusive as possible. |No one should feel
othered or alone. | The university should be a space for learning
and unlearning. | The university experience should constantly aim
to decolonise and deconstruct systems of oppression so people feel
included and represented. | University should be inclusive,
representative, and caring. | Education should be diverse,
accessible and human. | The university must be representative and
intersectional. | Fresher’s Week shouldn’t be the best week of a
university experience. | The university should be inclusive:
intellectually, pastorally, physically and otherwise.
Values-centred learning design
Intimacy and relationships
Personalisation/AI
Interdisciplinarity
50 short ‘vox pop’ interviews
Data
Values
Humans
Community
Data
Knowing and learning
Tactile, material, virtual
Reviews
AutomationParticipation and mobilityAcademic precarityNew degree modelsErosion of trust in public institutions
Datafication of societyArtificial intelligence (AI)Virtual and augmented realitiesEd-neurotech and cognitive enhancement drugs
Social
Technological
Scenario development
#1
Boundaries between employment, education and retirement get looser; education over a lifetime for the ageing population becomes the norm
Educational technology in schools is mainstreamed, bringing schooling further under the influence and values of Silicon Valley
Safe, smart drugs for cognitive enhancement become popular and readily available
Undergraduate enrolments continue to rise, including growth across the sector in access by students from disadvantaged backgrounds
#3
Years of automation and AI bring a lack of meaningful employment for large segments of the population
STEM and creative arts/humanities start to converge as interdisciplinary degree programmes become more common
Augmented, virtual and simulated realities move from marginal to mainstream
The proven negative cognitive effects of ubiquitous technology create strong off-the-grid counter-cultures
“The big data revolution and improvements in machine learning algorithms means that more occupations can be replaced by technology, including tasks once thought quintessentially human... Frey and Osborne's original (2013) study on employment suggested 47% of US jobs were at risk of computerisation.”Citigroup and University of Oxford (2016)
Automation
Learning analyticsLecture captureAutomated assessmentPlagiarism detectionCampus-wide AIAutomated TAsIntelligent tutoringAttention mapping‘Smart’ classrooms
creative teaching in partnership with code
better ways of valuing professional teachers and teaching
responsive teaching at scale routine academic work eliminated
‘productivity’ over pedagogy de-professionalisation of
academic work amplified academic precarity human teachers only for the elite
Automation
Analytics
personalisation and data-enabled alerts eliminate failure and attrition
nuanced views of large, diverse student populations enable targeted intervention
design of courses refined through new insights from participation data
academic performance metrics linked to student engagement data
data analytics drive a culture of student and academic surveillance
prediction eliminates agency
Distance
universities become more open and inclusive new decolonised forms of education emerge
through global student networks the best higher education becomes globally
accessible
human co-presence becomes de-valued universities lose their connection with cities campuses become hollowed-out simulacra
Empty HallsThey slide their glasses on, insert their ear pieces delicatelyAs the dark lecture hall fills with ghosts awakened electronicallyConnected now, the space is more illusion than realityThe students flicker in and out, avatars without integrityAs the loading bar spins they watch the lecturer refresh“Was she ever human?” they gossip. “Has she ever known flesh?”David Creighton-Offord
Siân Bayne, University of Edinburgh
@sbayne
Links and references: https://bit.ly/2GJOsPN