The Future of Student Needs
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THE FUTURE OF Living STUDENT NEEDS: 2025 AND BEYOND Participating Learning Student Needs The University of Houston 2025+ Foresight Program Connecting Working on behalf of Lumina Foundation Playing JUNE 2014 Brief Table of Contents Executive Summary 4 Chapter 1. Introduction 11 Chapter 2. The 2025 Context 16 Chapter 3. Current Assessments & Scanning 32 Chapter 4. Baseline Futures 60 Chapter 5. Alternative Futures 98 Chapter 6. Synthesis 132 Chapter 7. Implications: 139 Emerging Student Needs Appendices 148 References 157 Houston FORESIGHT: Preparing Professional Futurists 2 Detailed Table of Contents Appendices 148 A1. Recent Sources on the Future of 148 Executive Summary 4 Higher Education Chapter 1. Introduction 11 A2. Team Bios 150 The approach 12 References 157 Uses of this report 14 List of Tables Chapter 2. The 2025 Context 16 Four student types & personas 17 Table 1. Comparing the type personas 19 STEEP Trends 20 Table 2. Generations 21 Chapter 3. Current Assessments & Scanning 32 Table 3. Employment by Major Industry Sector 29 Current assessments 33 Table 4. From Baselines to Alternatives 133 A note on scanning 59 Table 5: Needs, services, and issues 145 Table 6: The nine emerging needs and 146 Chapter 4. Baseline Futures 60 Living: Easy Is Good 61 the four student types Learning: Institutions under Pressure 68 Working: The Super-Skilled, 73 List of Figures Messy Middle, and Warm Bodies Figure 1. Modified framework 12 Playing: Scheduled Play 80 Figure 2. Student Needs 2025+ categories 13 Connecting: More Ways to Connect 86 Figure 3. Student Needs 2025+ domain map 14 Participating: Hacker Nation 93 Figure 4. What is a student? 16 Chapter 5. Alternative Futures 98 Figure 5. Traditional persona 17 Living: The “Ours” Economy: 99 Figure 6. 1st Gen persona 17 The Rise of Collaborative Consumption Figure 7. Adult persona 18 Learning: Student-Centric 103 Figure 8. Independent persona 18 Working: Welcome to the Jungle 108 Figure 9. Four values types 20 Playing: It’s All Play 115 Figure 10. Generations & higher ed 22 Connecting: From Connection to 122 Figure 11. Economic scenarios 28 Immersion Figure 12. Diigo bookmarking site 59 Participating: NationCraft: 127 Figure 13. Scanning hit tags 59 Rebuilding Governance Figure 14. Baseline futures 60 Chapter 6. Synthesis 132 Figure 15. Living scanning sampler 61 Transitioning from baselines to alternatives 132 Figure 16. Learning scanning sampler 69 Key themes 134 Figure 17. Extrinsic & intrinsic needs 71 Differences within the six domains 137 Figure 18. Converging student opportunities 71 Issues or obstacles to monitor 138 Figure 19. Working scanning sampler 75 Chapter 7. Implications: 139 Figure 20. Playing scanning sampler 83 Emerging Student Needs Figure 21. Connecting scanning sampler 89 1. Re-skilling 140 Figure 22. Participating scanning sampler 94 2. Mentoring 141 Figure 23. Alternative futures 98 3. Continuous real-time feedback 141 Figure 24. The 1st shift: Converging 106 4. Frameworks (for navigating new uncertainties) 141 opportunities 5. Credentials 142 Figure 25. The 2st shift: New focus 106 6. “Experiences” 143 Figure 26. New equilibrium 132 7. Personalized instruction 143 Figure 27. Shifting balance of power 135 8. Spaces, tools, & templates 144 Figure 28. Blurring boundaries 135 9. Differentiation 144 Figure 29. Influential technologies 136 Houston FORESIGHT: Preparing Professional Futurists 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With the support of Lumina Foundation, the Students Needs 2025+ research team from the University of Houston Foresight Program looked for ways to add something new to the discussion about the future of higher education. It found three openings or opportunities to inject some new thinking, with the goal of catalyzing innovative responses to emerging student needs. • First, much of the writing about the future of higher education assumes continuity in the future— what we call the “baseline future” in which present trends continue and perhaps accelerate, but by 2025 the higher education system is intact. A smaller body of literature assumes the opposite, a transformational future in which the current system is re-made based largely on developments coming from the outside. We explored how the continuity of the baseline future could be disrupted. Even then, we found that we did not have to create a radically transformed future in order to identify a provocative set of student needs. In other words, even a fairly continuous evolution of student life in the future will create a set of student needs that is likely to create significant challenges for established institutions. • Second, much of the literature about the future of higher education takes the viewpoint of the institution rather than the student. Therefore, we chose to explore the future from the student point-of-view. • Third, even those works that do consider students only consider them in school, not in the context of their overall life. Therefore, our view of the future goes beyond higher education and looks at student life as a whole rather than just their life in school. Using the Houston Foresight Program’s “Framework Foresight” approach, the first step was to define the “domain,” the aspects of student life to be explored, in order to look for emerging student needs of the future. Student life was therefore sorted into six categories: • Living focuses on changes in student consumption patterns, Figure 2. Student Needs 2025+ categories health, and housing, and investigates key changes in their routine of daily life, such as how they might be spending their time differently in the future. Living • Learning focuses on how students might learn, whether Participating Learning within an institutional setting or not, and investigates major changes in how they are acquiring the information Student and skills they need to get along in life. Needs 2025+ • Working focuses on the future job market and needs Connecting Working relating to work beyond just having a job, and investigates key changes in how work is done. Playing • Playing focuses on changes in student approaches to leisure, recreation, and having fun and investigates how playing in general is changing. Houston FORESIGHT: Preparing Professional Futurists 4 • Connecting focuses on changes in how students connect with one another, their friends, family, and colleagues—both real and virtual—in the physical and online space, and investigates the changing means by which they do so. • Participating focuses on how students might participate differently in civic life and investigates what it means to be a citizen in the future and how people interact with government and non- government groups. The four student types The students themselves are organized into four types. The inspiration for the student types emerged from work related to a Lumina “Students Rising” scenario workshop held in November 2011. The personas exist today and are anticipated to remain a relevant and useful framework out to 2025. The implications of the forecasts—i.e., the identification of emerging student needs—will use the four types as an organizing framework. Each type is illustrated by a representative persona in the text. • Traditional. Those who go straight to college after graduating high school or soon thereafter. • First generation. They are the first within their family to attend college. • Adult. Older than traditional and first generation students, they often need to attend school part-time to balance work, family, and education. • Independent. They come to learning from divergent paths, often accumulating bits and pieces of credits and work experiences from different places. The STEEP context A common context for the year 2025 was crafted using the popular futurist STEEP framework of social, technological, economic, environmental, and political trends. Rather than have the six domain teams each report on the STEEP trends, the key ones were pulled out and gathered together to provide readers a common context within which to situate the forecasts. Current assessments & scanning The Framework Foresight process begins by framing the domain with a current assessment. We produced a current assessment for each of the six domains, consisting of a domain description followed by a summary of its current conditions. The domain description is in three parts: first, the domain is briefly summarized in a paragraph or two; second, a visual domain map highlights the key categories guiding the team’s research; and third, key stakeholders are identified. Once the domain is described, the important current conditions, that is, the essential need-to-know information about the domain in the present, are identified. The idea is to ground the domain in the present before forecasting its future. Scanning identifies what might change in the domains in the future. Individual scanning hits are collected in a web-based bookmarking site that Lumina will be able to access. The current assessments and scanning provide the foundation for the baseline and alternative futures. Houston FORESIGHT: Preparing Professional Futurists 5 The baseline futures The baseline future grounds the exploration of future possibilities and outcomes by identifying what the future would look like if present trends continue, major plans are fulfilled, and there are no major surprises. Figure 14. Baseline futures BASELINE FUTURES Living “Hacker Nation” “Institutions Under An influential “hacktivist” Pressure” movement that promotes Non-traditional approaches to greater transparency of Participating “Easy Is Good” Learning