Near Future Teaching: Our vision in summary
The Near Future Teaching project is nearing its completion, and we have produced our final report.
Over the two years of the project we have worked with over 400 students, staff, and other stakeholders in the co-production the values we want to shape our preferred future for digital education.
In this post, we explain our vision is and give a sense of some of the actions we will collectively take to make it real.
Here is what we did
The Near Future Teaching project employed futures-thinking and design-based methodologies in the coproduction of a vision and a set of values. We built insight by running workshops across the university community and reviewing global trends in digital and higher education. We co-developed a set of community values and preferences for the future of digital education. And finally we developed a broad set of aims for a preferred future, and define a set of actions to help us build this preferred future.

Our community values
The project advocated for the idea that the university community should take stock and actively shape a preferred future for teaching based on shared values, at a time when technological change is accelerating and often assumed to be driving the future of learning. It opened space for reflection and the application of collective agency to the question of the future of teaching and learning at this university. The values distilled from our work acroos the community were that we should emphasise:
1: Experience over Assessment: Learning should not be over-assessed and instrumentalised. Teaching should share a focus on employability and success with an understanding of the value of rich experience, creativity, curiosity and – sometimes – failure.
2: Diversity and Justice: Education should design-in meaningful diversity and real inclusion across all areas of activity. All near future teaching should further social responsibility and global justice.
3: Relationships First: Relationships, dialogues and personal exchanges between students and staff build understanding in a way that is not possible via transmissive forms of teaching. Teaching should be designed to provide the time and space for proper relationships and meaningful human exchange.
4: Participation and Flexibility: The university community should cooperatively shape how – and what – it learns and teaches. Flexibility for individuals, fluency across disciplines and cooperative responsibility for curricula should shape near future teaching.
Our vision for a preferred future
The vision and aims for a preferred future based on these values. We have assigned many actions to these aims, which are viewable in the full report. Here, we just give a few examples.

1: Community-focused: digital education with the university community at its heart
Objectives: Prioritising human contact and relationships; Connecting our community of scholarship in new and diverse ways; Committing to technology which makes the university accessible and welcoming
Example Action #1: Provide easily accessible training to staff and students focused on social media skills specifically for teaching, and develop support frameworks for those experiencing toxicity, trolling and victimisation online.
Example Action #2: Use technology to build relationships between students and staff based on trust, resisting logics of surveillance and unnecessary monitoring.]

2: Post-digital: education which recognises that technology is now fully embedded within daily life
Objectives: Re-working the concept of ‘contact time’ to reflect contemporary practice; Breaking down the boundaries between on and off campus; Re-thinking what it means to be ‘here’ at Edinburgh; Offering more flexible ways to be part of the university community
Example Action #1: Define and embed a re-worked understanding of ‘contact time’ into workload models and course descriptors, which takes account of student mobility, distance education and flexible patterns of study.
Example Action #2: Plan for the introduction of technological capacity to teach online and on-campus students together in joint cohorts.

3: Data fluent: digital education that understands data, data skills and the data society
Objectives: Taking a research-led approach to education and data; Understanding the possibilities and problems surrounding the datafication of education; Addressing automation with an emphasis on human skills; Engaging creatively and responsibly with learning data
Example Action #1: Create specialist academic development opportunities for staff to fully understand how to analyse and interpret learning and engagement analytics, within an understanding that the datafication of teaching is likely to accelerate and intensify in the coming decades.
Example Action #2: Embed critical understanding of data ethics and algorithmic accountability within academic development and staff training.

4: Playful and experimental: enabling creative academic and student-led R&D for digital education
Objectives: Confidently opening our teaching practice to technological change; Being energetic in designing new, creative ways of teaching digitally; Using our academic expertise to develop and scale up new forms of digital education; Making access to technical development expertise easier for staff and students
Example Action #1: Provide teaching staff and students with central access to programmers and developers for joint prototyping and trialling of new ways of doing digital education. Support associated pedagogic research via Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme and other channels.
Example Action #2: Fund a cross-institutional programme of work to scope and develop new virtual and augmented realities for teaching

5: Assessment-oriented: digital education with a focus on assessment and feedback
Objectives: Diversifying assessment practice; Making the assessment more engaging for students and academics; Supporting new kinds of feedback
Example Action #1
Launch a cross-university, discipline-sensitive programme of work to increase diversity in forms of assessment, including multimodal (video, audio, image, making) and experiential forms (projects, blogs, reflections, reports).
Example Action #2
Build a culture – supported by technology as appropriate – in which students have greater choice over the form of their assessments. Enable risk-taking by, for example, giving students greater choice over which assignments count toward final marks.

6: Boundary-challenging: digital education that is lifelong, open and transdisciplinary
Objectives: Building a culture of lifelong learning; Supporting teaching which transcends disciplines; Committing to openness; Connecting to the city and region
Example Action #1: Build capacity for individuals to develop a lifelong relationship with the university regardless of their geographical location or career stage, via open and digital education. Make it easy for local people to be part of the university community through informal as well as formal learning.
Example Action #2: Invest to develop transdisciplinary, university-wide courses in key areas, bringing together the best of our online and on campus teaching.
Our task now is to put all this into action!
Near Future Teaching Workshop #2: a summary
Following on from the first Near Future Teaching workshop last month, we gathered again recently to continue our design of the future of digital education.
Here, our focus was on convergence with the core values the university community would like to see defining our future teaching. The 19 opinion cards that were created from the interviews and insights from staff and students over the last year were summarised into 4 core values:
- Experience over Measurement
- Exchange over Instruction
- Diverse and Inclusive
- Participatory and Transparent
The workshop was again designed and led by Santini and Zoe from Andthen, a studio specialising in futures thinking and design research. We began by reviewing the four future world scenarios we developed through the first workshop. Briefly, these were:
In groups, the workshop began mapping the four core values to each of these worlds, trying to understand how they might be played out in each.
Using a blank jigsaw manufactured by Zoe and Santini, each group built layers around one of these worlds. The first encapsulated how the four values might be manifested, based on group discussion.
The second layer provided speculative examples of what digital education specifically might look like for each of these ‘value’ quartiles. Sian provided a brief brain dump trying to encapsulate something of what we mean when we talk about ‘digital education’:
Finally, we used props to begin to illustrate the speculative examples of digital education devised by each group: using playdoh, toy robots and plastic fruit we attempted to bring these worlds to life. The groups narrated their scenarios to one another and the workshop concluded, taking us another step closer to the co-design of a values-based approach to our digital education futures.

Near Future Teaching: reviews of the key trends
As part of the Near Future Teaching project we have been working on two short reviews which attempt to summarise what we see as the key trends and influences likely to be shaping digital education in universities over the short to medium term.
We have created two of these and want to share them with others who might find them useful:
Future Teaching trends: education and society (4 pages plus references)
Future Teaching trends: science and technology (6 pages plus references)
In writing them, we have focused on aligning the analysis of key trends with the insights coming out of our work with the students and staff who constitute the university (you can see thematic summaries of the things people are discussing here on our video page).
So while there are plenty of megatrend reports, horizon scanning documents, key trends barometers, policy documents and foresight analyses out there which have helped us, we have focused on maintaining a critical edge which looks at what the impact of current technological and educational trends might be on students, staff, communities and the universities in which we work.
If you have any feedback on the reviews, please get in touch.
Near Future Teaching- methods and a progress report
Now that Near Future Teaching is well underway, it seems like a good time to write a short blog post on our project methodology, how it’s going, and what we hope we will achieve by the time the project finishes toward the end of the year.
The project has the over-arching aim to design the future of digital education at Edinburgh. Our objectives:
- To conduct a participative, institution-wide conversation about digital education and its trajectory at Edinburgh
- To focus on values, curriculum and pedagogy, not only on technological change
- To surface conversations on the open web, foregrounding student voices through high quality media and building awareness of the project across the sector
- To synthesise project findings into an actionable design for the future of digital education, usable by Schools and Colleges
It took us a while to work out how best to build a participative vision in such a large, complex university. At the moment Edinburgh has almost 40,000 thousand students, a staff count of just under 10,000, three Colleges, 20 Schools with many, many sub-units, plus of course our support services. It’s probably fair to say that nothing quite like this project has been attempted before here.

In the end, the process we devised was adapted from the work Keri Facer and colleagues conducted a few years ago as part of a large project looking at long-term sociotechnical futures for education (and published most accessibly in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Our version has five stages:
- Foresight:
- Taking the community pulse
- Mapping in the form of two foresight reviews focusing on factors likely to influence change in education over the coming years:
- scientific and technical trends
- social and educational factors
- Scenario development:
- Scoping plausible future worlds
- Designing educational futures for each
- Testing ideas and designs
- Student panel
- Academic expert panel
- Children’s panel
- Surfacing insights and recommendations
- Translation into policy and action
At this point we have just about reached the end of stage 1., having run and written up a series of events and done short interviews with input from around 300 students and staff. These latter we’ve edited thematically and made available here on the website, with write-ups from each of the events also surfaced here in our blog. We’ll be publishing the reviews here shortly too.
It’s important to the project that we surface as much of our process as possible, trying to show our workings rather than just producing a final report which obscures how it was produced.
