Higher Education Futures: 8 scenarios, 8 tarot cards and 8 short stories
We present eight new speculative scenarios for the future of higher education teaching:
- Extinction-era universities
- AI academy
- The universal university
- Extreme unbundling
- Justice-driven innovation
- Return to the ivory tower
- The university of ennui
- Enhanced enhancement
We hope that these scenarios will work as a provocation, and a starting point, for new conversations about the future of our universities and the teaching we do through them.
As well as the scenarios themselves, we have produced a collection of speculative short fiction, one for each scenario. Our intention is to use all of this in workshops, talks and other settings where we do collaborative future-making work with colleagues and students.
We offer them to others who may wish to do the same. They are freely re-usable with attribution and consist of:
- a set of scenario ‘tarot’ cards. Download cards.
- a set of posters, one for each scenario. Download posters.
- a booklet of short stories, with the scenarios gathered at the end. Download booklet.
- Attribution, non commercial https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
This work is not a prediction of what will happen. Some of these scenarios could not logically co-exist within the same reality. Rather, they aim to unsettle assumed futures and support us to imagine new, desirable ones. They are told from a particular time and place, and speak to present concerns and hopes.
We hope you will find them enjoyable and useful for your own work – and please get in touch if you would like to talk to us about them.