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Introduction to ‘Futures of Higher Education’ Special Issue
Abstract
One of the main missions of higher education is to prepare the young (but not exclusively them) for future challenges. It not only has the potential to change individual lives but it can also make the social fabric more resilient and adaptive. However, presently this future is highly uncertain and fraught with risks. This radical uncertainty makes it difficult to identify future-proof knowledge, skills and capacities. Moreover, it also raises questions about the possible roles higher education should play in future societies. We argue that higher education should be an active agent in shaping future society. In order to fulfil its potential as such, this type of agency-orientation should transcend its core activities, like research and teaching, currently built into its institutional settings. This special issue highlights certain possible directions for change as far as HEIs are concerned. These future possibilities are in relation to learning, ethics, fairness, community involvement and the role of research at institutions which were formerly teaching-oriented. These can be seen as first steps towards understanding what organisational changes are needed for HEIs to maintain their social relevance and to actively shape their environment.
... The Anthropocene and the COVID-19 pandemic (hereafter "the pandemic") further challenge business schools to rethink teaching about organising and managing (e.g. Brammer & Clark, 2020;Király & Géring, 2019;Rocha et al., 2020). The pandemic, for example, made explicit the depth of social, racial and gender inequalities around the world. ...
... At the same time, business education has been affected by global trends that transform the natural, social, economic and technological environment, such as climate change, digitalisation, robotisation and automation (Király & Géring, 2019). For instance, the "dress rehearsal" (Latour, 2020) of remote global education, triggered by the pandemic, made us to test different online pedagogies (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020;Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021) and to realise that remote learning will remain somehow, even after the pandemic ends (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020;Brammer & Clark, 2020;Govindarajan & Srivastava, 2020). ...
... Besides, the Anthropocene, characterised by the effects of human activity on Earth that lead to climate change, biodiversity loss, soil, air and water contamination, among other phenomena (Gasparin et al., 2020;Mitchell et al., 2020), will bring a lot of uncertainty, and force us to come up with alternative forms of organising (Wright et al., 2018), since sustaining business-as-usual will become difficult (Mitchell et al., 2020). Hence, business schools will have to adopt alternative forms of reasoning and imagination (Gasparin et al., 2020) to recover some of their legitimacy and social relevance (Király & Géring, 2019;Rocha et al., 2020). ...
The legitimacy of business education and its impact on society have been debated in the context of the economic and climate crises, with curricula, learning spaces and pedagogy being the main targets of criticism. Somehow, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased that pressure and added social inequalities to the debate. Thus, this paper proposes an exercise of imagining what management education and society will be like in 2050. Using speculative imagination, we narrate three imaginaries - Techno Futurist, Sustained Inequalities and Eco-utopia - built upon the perspective of the students of a sustainability programme at an elite Brazilian business school. Throughout the construction of the imaginaries' narratives, we found dilemmas and contradictions that alert us that there is no clear path to an emancipatory future and that, unfortunately, the tendency is to reproduce neoliberal ideology and managerialism. Furthermore, the lack of diversity of teachers and students, a direct consequence of business schools’ admission and funding, can hinder new imaginaries. We conclude by inviting business schools to include imagination as a critical exercise for students, so that they can organise outside of “business as usual”, open up alternative futures, and cope with the uncertainties that surround us.
... In their editorial, Király and Géring (2019) go even further by advocating for a more holistic transformation of higher education institutions towards more active agency in the surrounding society. Similarly, Rieckmann (2012) calls for a more future-oriented attitude in higher education that provides students with tools and capabilities to tackle wicked problems. ...
... Similarly, Amsler and Facer (2017) elucidate how neoliberalism has infused discourses on education with profitability, and how a more diverse dealing of potential and imaginable futures could enable us to transcend futures dictated by the current status quo of neoliberal and colonial capitalism. Here, (higher) education institutions can operate as laboratories for imagining potential futures whilst also provoking thinking about alternatives to capitalism and ubiquitous commodification (Király & Géring, 2019). ...
... More specifically, as futures consciousness is understood as an individual capacity (e.g., (Ahvenharju et al., 2018(Ahvenharju et al., , 2021, our findings shed light on how designerly ways of engaging with the problem at hand support the development of agency. In addition, our study offers student-level insights on how competencies identified by Rieckmann (2012) develop as well as what Király and Géring (2019) call for institutional transformation implies from the student's perspective. Next, we will separately go through the different components of the model. ...
As the world and its challenges are becoming more complex, students and practitioners alike need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how to navigate problems today for envisioning desirable futures. Design’s inherent focus on future-making and dealing with ill-defined problems has been identified as a potential way forward. Yet, there is a paucity of studies looking at what elements support (or hinder) students developing agency when it comes to framing and identifying problems. By taking the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as an example of ill-defined problems, we studied a multidisciplinary student body in a higher education institution attending a three-week intensive course focusing on how design can serve as a catalyst for social and environmental change. Our findings suggest future-oriented problem framing is dependent on the following aspects: combining theory and practice, engaging with the world and its complexities, reciprocal trust in design teams, self-reflection, changing perspectives, and emotional investment. Based on the findings, a model is crafted to illustrate how agency for future-making can emerge and be developed by engaging with real-life problems through design. Implications for research and practice point towards a more balanced relationship between skill development and ways of engaging with the surrounding world.
... Our conceptual contribution builds on the recent suggestion that business schools' instrumental strategies should be replaced by the pursuit of their purpose to enhance the public good (Kitchener, 2019;Kitchener and Delbridge, 2021). Concentrating on the 'greenfield' area of J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f external engagement (Király and Géring, 2019), we elaborate that line of scholarship in two ways. First, from our review of previous research, we establish a typology of business school engagement approaches that has two dimensions: (a) strategic focus (instrumentalpurposeful), and (b) engagement management (organic-co-ordinated). ...
... This is displayed through common practices such as J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f large firms' sponsorship of applied projects (Bozeman and Corley, 2004), executives sitting on business schools' advisory boards, and functional student internships and company-based projects (Aguinis et al., 2019). This restricted pattern of external engagement persists despite mounting calls for business schools to advance the public good by working with a wider variety of external partners including community stakeholders such as regulators, trade unions, co-operatives, purpose-led organisations, and social enterprises (Király and Géring, 2019;Thomas and Ambrosini, 2021). ...
Building on recent suggestions that business schools’ instrumental (outcomes-focussed) strategies should be replaced by the pursuit of their purpose to enhance the public good, this paper answers the special edition’s call to consider business school futures by presenting a foresight exercise that first conceives, and then illustrates, ways that purpose-driven business schools can extend (deepen and broaden) their external engagement activity. From our review of previous research, we present a new typology of business school engagement approaches that has two dimensions: (a) strategic focus (instrumental-purposeful), and (b) engagement management (organic-co-ordinated). From our scan of the business school environment in the United Kingdom (UK) and France, we illustrate, with empirical examples, the two purposeful engagement approaches in our typology (organic and co-ordinated). These findings indicate a variety of ways that business schools of the future can better enhance the public good through extended engagement.
... -заинтересованность административного персонала университетов в достижении измеримых показателей, а не достижении миссии университета [5]; -большую величину миграционных потоков, что изменяет структуру обучающихся, что увеличивает разнообразие студентов в вузах [6], требует включения различных точек зрения и проблем в учебную программу, а также а также предоставление различных и гибких маршрутов, по которым студенты могут приобрести знания, навыки и компетенции, в которых они нуждаются [7]; -возможность влияния политической напряженности на вузы; ...
... Университеты и другие организации высшего образования должны быть готовы к вызовам, связанным с тем, как они создают и передают знания и информацию, возникающие в результате таких инноваций. Многие исследования [4,7,[23][24][25][26][27][28][29] сходятся на том, что академический дух становится центральным для возможности трудоустройства в университетском образовании. Он определяется как способность академически соотноситься с работать в трех направлениях, которые требуют уникальных человеческих способностей для решения задач понимания: академическое суждение, академическое творчество и инновации и академическая воля. ...
... A competency-based approach to developing academic programs [55] could be successful in shaping attitudes towards sustainability, but there is a need for a more complex approach in developing different levels of education [56] The authors' explicit purpose is to contribute the educational challenges. The relevant literature notes that local characteristics should be considered [57][58][59]. Certain studies [60,61] emphasize that the next generation's attitudes are clearly very important because the next generation will be the beneficiaries of present decisions. For Hungary, Varga [62] found small but significant positive correlations between the knowledge and attitudes related to environmental issues. ...
... The authors' explicit purpose is to contribute the educational challenges. The relevant literature notes that local characteristics should be considered [57][58][59]. Certain studies [60,61] emphasize that the next generation's attitudes are clearly very important because the next generation will be the beneficiaries of present decisions. For Hungary, Varga [62] found small but significant positive correlations between the knowledge and attitudes related to environmental issues. ...
Renewable and nuclear power technologies are considered alternatives to fossil-based power. However, which of the two is superior remains a matter of contention. Besides technological development, local access to resources, and energy policies, social acceptance is a key issue; informing future decisions on energy sources thus requires a complex approach. Personal attitudes to energy technologies may differ from professional opinions and national policies. The purpose of this study is to explore the attitudes and opinions regarding renewable and nuclear power generation technologies by pairwise comparison. This evaluation includes the return on the investment, the availability of said technologies, environmental impact, knowledge/need of use, and expectations for future of energy production. The research sample consists of 250 randomly selected Hungarian higher education students as representatives of future corporate decision-makers. The results show that the respondents demonstrate an appreciation of renewable energy technologies. Solar energy is appreciated, but confidence in nuclear power is low, except for its future role. These opinions are not consistent with the national energy policies or professional evaluations. These differences will allow us to refine communication and education in the field.
... A jelentésben bemutatott forgatókönyvek "Az üzleti oktatás jövője" című négyéves kutatási projekt keretében kerültek kialakításra¹. A projekt fő célja az volt, hogy feltérképezze azokat a kibontakozó tendenciákat, amelyek hatással lehetnek a felsőoktatás jövőjére általában (Király -Géring, 2019, illetve különös tekintettel az üzleti oktatásra. A forgatókönyveket azt követően alakítottuk ki, hogy megvizsgáltuk az egyes (a társadalmat és az oktatás területét érintő) trendek összefüggéseit. ...
A jelentésben bemutatott forgatókönyvek “Az üzleti oktatás jövője” című négyéves kutatási projekt keretében kerültek kialakításra. A projekt fő célja az volt, hogy feltérképezze azokat a kibontakozó tendenciákat, amelyek hatással lehetnek a felsőoktatás jövőjére általában, illetve különös tekintettel az üzleti oktatásra. A forgatókönyveket azt követően alakítottuk ki, hogy megvizsgáltuk az egyes (a társadalmat és az oktatás területét érintő) trendek összefüggéseit. A szcenáriók az akadémiai kutatást és tanulást, valamint a szervezetfejlesztést hivatottak elosegíteni.
... One more reason for universities to discursively reinforce their legitimacy is the general decline of trust in their competency regarding useful knowledge transfer (Király and Géring 2019). An ongoing debate appears frequently in the public discourse on the raison d'être of traditional HEIs, one side claiming that they are not capable of teaching useful skills but focus too much on theoretical knowledge, which the students can hardly apply later (Király and Géring 2021). ...
In this paper, we investigate how highly ranked business schools construct their legitimacy claims by analysing their online organisational communication. We argue that in the case of higher education institutions in general, and business schools in particular, the discursive formation of these legitimacy claims is strongly connected to the future. Consequently, we utilise corpus-based discourse analysis of highly ranked business schools’ website communication by focusing on sentences containing the expression ‘future’. At first, we analysed the future-related language use to reveal the general future picture in the corpus. Furthermore, by combining qualitative and quantitative textual data, we identified six typical agency frames (i.e. preparing, shaping, adjusting, exploring, personal future, responsibility) about the future. By examining the co-occurrence of these frames, we were able to identify different discursive strategies. As we connected our findings to general societal phenomena we could interpret why and how business schools utilise these discursive strategies to (re)create and maintain their legitimacy.
... As modern science and technology is developing rapidly and people's living standards are improving continuously, modern education is now paying more attention to the cultivation of professional talents; in the context of quality education, cultivating professional talents with high comprehensive qualities has become an important goal for modern education [1][2][3][4]. As an important part of modern education, dance teaching plays a promotive role in improving the level of quality education [5][6], and one important factor for enhancing the competitiveness of dance majors and cultivating highlevel dance professionals is the teaching ability of dance major courses. ...
To improve the teaching ability of dance major courses, special attention should be paid to the following factors: the completeness of the evaluation index system (EIS), the fuzziness and uncertainty of the evaluation process, and the reliability and accuracy of the evaluation. Considering these factors, this paper summarizes the connotations and essential features of the teaching ability of dance major courses, and explores deep into the factors affecting that teaching ability. On this basis, the authors created a series of improved EISs and constructed an improved model for the evaluation of the teaching ability of dance courses, drawing on entropy method and grey theory. The proposed model enables dance teachers to improve their ability to teach dance major courses. The research results lay the theoretical and practical bases for the teaching reform in the dance major of colleges.
... Following the gradual improvement of the living standards and the rapid development of science and technology in modern society, high-level comprehensive talents have been increasingly needed in social development, and the role of modern education has been further highlighted. Meanwhile, quality-oriented education becomes the focus in modern education [1][2][3][4]. As an important part of modern education, physical education plays a very positive role in improving the comprehensive quality of contemporary college students. ...
This paper mainly designs a research-oriented teaching (ROT) model for public physical education (PE) in colleges based on extenics theory, which overcomes the limits and defects of the current ROT model for public PE in colleges. From the theoretical perspective, the extenics theory and method were discussed in details for implementing the ROT model for public PE in colleges. From the angle of engineering application, the authors designed an improved evaluation index system (EIS) for the implementation effect of the said ROT model, and developed the corresponding extenics superiority model, which quantifies the implementation effect. The research results further improve the ROT model for public PE in colleges.
... 15). As a necessary corollary to re/thinking possible futures of higher education (Király & Géring, 2019), through preemption we explore the role of prediction in fueling the futures-to-never-come of student success, or the permanent present. ...
The student success movement in higher education has shifted the dominant logic of university operations from Astin's Input-Environment-Output to Massumi's logic of preemption. Predictive analytics, a key technology of the student success movement, are a manifestation of this qualitative shift in institutional logics. No longer content to prevent student failure, we must now preempt it, and this shift in logic is remaking undergraduate education in ways heretofore un-considered. In this shift, student success no longer shapes reality through environmental adjustments , but creates its own realities using success as a desired outcome held permanently in the future. This worldmaking is examined through the new empiricisms in two areas: the concept of wasted credits and the subject position of the stealth student. The impasses present at these locations create both futures-to-never-come as well as the space for critical anticipations of speculative futures.
... Ez azt is mutatja, hogy megrendült az a bizalom, hogy felsőoktatási intézmények valóban tudják-e olyan módon oktatni és képezni a hozzájuk jelentkező tanulókat, hogy a kimeneti oldalon a végzettek tudása és készségei megfeleljenek a jövő munkaerőpiaci igényeinek (Selingo, 2016). Szintén kérdés, hogy mi a felsőoktatási intézmények társadalmi szerepe egy folyamatosan változó társadalmi és technológiai környezetben (Király & Géring, 2019). Mennyire tudnak hozzájárulni az egyének egzisztenciális jelentéskereséséhez, valamint a társadalmi együttélés kérdéseinek tisztázásához? ...
A felsőoktatási jövőjével kapcsolatbanhárom olyan kihívás-területet azonosítottunk, amelyek a szervezeteket nehézségek és választások elé állítják. Egyrészt megvizsgáljuk, hogy az egyetemek lehetséges gazdasági szerepével kapcsolatban milyen elvárások fogalmazódnak a vállalkozó egyetem koncepciója keretében. Arra is kitérünk röviden, hogy milyen próbálkozások történtek az elmúlt években ennek a szervezeti sablonnak a kiterjesztésére, úgymond befogadóbbá tételére. Másodikként áttekintjük, hogy az egyetemek mennyire és hogyan képesek az emberi értékteremtéshez, szűkebb értelemben a hallgatók foglalkoztathatóságához hozzájárulni. Ez a kérdés különösen érdekes, ha elfogadjuk annak az állításnak a létjogosultságát, hogy a jövőbeni környezet, amelyre a hallgatókat fel kellene készíteniük alapvetően bizonytalan és kiszámíthatatlan. Végül a társadalmi értékteremtéssel kapcsolatban felmerül annak a kérdése is, hogy az intézmények mennyire képesek megtartani esetleg kiterjeszteni azt a szerepüket, hogy hozzájáruljanak a társadalmi szintű változásokhoz, valamint tematizálják a társadalmak önértelmezésével kapcsolatos diskurzusokat.
... Physical education (PE) is an essential part of higher education. High-quality PE helps college students develop in an all-round way [1][2][3]. Currently, various modern techniques and concepts have been applied to higher education, reshaping the contents, forms, means and modes of PE in colleges [4][5][6]. ...
There are several problems with the evaluation of the learning effect of physical education (PE) major courses in colleges, namely, the diversity of constraints and the lack of multiple perspectives. To solve the problems, this paper puts forward a novel model to evaluate the said learning effect. Firstly, the authors identified the problems and principles of learning effect evaluation of PE major courses in colleges, and established an evaluation index system from the perspectives of teachers and students. On this basis, an effective evaluation algorithm was developed to quantify the learning effect through gray clustering analysis. The proposed evaluation model can accurately assess the learning effect of PE major courses. The research findings enjoy great significance in theoretical innovation and engineering application.
... PMDSU is one of the breakthroughs to accelerate the number of Doctor in Indonesia and encourage international publications. Universities and ministries must be able to prepare young people to face future challenges [1]. ...
Integrated Master-Doctor program for excellent undergraduate student (Pendidikan Magister Menuju Doktor untuk Sarjana Unggul hereafter PMDSU) is a government program in the effort to increase the number of doctors and the number of international publications for doctoral supervisors in Indonesia. The program has been running since 2013 and has received students in 4 batches until 2018. Based on the year of entry, PMDSU batch I should have completed the study and PMDSU batch II has entered its final year. From that endeavour, this paper describes the achievements of PMDSU student and supervisor’s publications. The hypothesis raised is the number of publications and supervisor’s h-index influences the number of joint scientific publications between students and supervisor for batch I and II. PMDSU students and supervisors batch I and batch II are spread across 12 educational institutions in Indonesia. The findings show that the highest number of student’s publication is 17 articles. The level of participation of PMDSU students in scientific articles reaches 60% of 323 registered students. Based on student participation, an increase in the number of supervisor’sscientific articles was influenced weakly by the participation of PMDSU students. At the other hand, the supervisor’s h-index is also very weak in influencing the number of publications published by PMDSU students. Based on the results obtained, student’s participation can slightly increase the number of supervisor scientific articles, and the supervisor’s h-index has no relation to the number of publications published by PMDSU students.
... Further the adoption of Industry 4.0 is changing the education and skills requirements of personnel, as duties and responsibilities are changing, necessitating changes in higher education institutions. The lack of inclusion of climate change and mitigation in course content is another issue requiring address, given the global focus of mitigating climate change impact [4]. ...
... Therefore, the prognostic research and possibly, actions as to how assist highly qualified professionals in finding new ways of organising their lives with the risk (very real) of losing their jobs in several years or a decade, is worthwhile and timely. Moreover, for adult educators the research focus may have another important dimension, and namely -how to re-organise their own education and reshape their own profession, because of the increasing e-learning opportunities, even profession of an educator is at risk of being made redundant, if educators do not invest in their own performance [11]. ...
... The future is […] understood as a […] resource to interpret and come to grips with the complexity, possibilities and precariousness of the present. However, while there has been recent robust discussion about the future of Higher Education (HE) (Király & Géring, 2019) this paper offers a singular contribution towards an empirically grounded discussion of FE futures. ...
This article examines the ways in which actions taken by the leadership teams of further education (FE) colleges in the UK are consistent with leaders’ beliefs of the role and value of the sector, exploring the extent to which such actions might bring about desireable futures. The future of the sector has been an ongoing concern for commentators as austerity drives extensive cuts in funding that force leaders to make difficult decisions regarding students, staffing and curriculum. Drawing on interview data from a case study of 10 leadership teams, the article utilises three previously identified scenarios of potential future worlds of education to assess the implications of leadership decisions for colleges. Our analysis suggests that leaders experience a policy-driven tension between two ethics of survival: survival as a financially viable institution and survival as a representation of the core values of FE. The paper concludes that while leadership actions may contribute to the further political devaluing of the sector and its designation as a labour-market skills provider, some attempts are made to preserve its wider contribution to society, offering a basis for the creation of a more socially just future for FE.
Las instituciones de educación superior han sido caracterizadas frecuentemente como instituciones reacias al cambio, que presentan desarrollos organizacionales poco acoplados entre sí a razón de contar con elevados niveles de especialización y diferenciación estructural, la presencia de “silos culturales”, así como la pervivencia de sistemas de recompensa que promueven la autonomía y el logro individual, lo que, combinado con bucles de retroalimentación débiles, a menudo dificultan que logren dirigir sus esfuerzos apropiadamente hacia el mejoramiento continuo.
El presente trabajo contiene la base conceptual de un proceso diagnóstico organizacional, presentado a partir de siete dimensiones de análisis estratégico de la función universitaria, formuladas a partir del cuerpo teórico de referencia. Cada dimensión se define, a su vez, en categorías y características observables.
Current marketplace narratives demand a move from shareholder towards stakeholder primacy and responsible capitalism yielding social value creation. In parallel, the demand for entrepreneurial value creation at higher education institutions (including, but not limited to business schools) continues to grow. The intersection of these two demands, however, engenders critical tensions. While social value creation emphasizes stakeholder returns and a long-term perspective, entrepreneurial value creation revolves around investment returns and short-term agility. As a result, business schools have been grappling to find ways to incorporate a broader, holistic view on value creation into their activities. We bring together future studies and management scholars and scholarship to explore futures literacy as an instrumental capability for business schools. Our research suggests that an interdisciplinary approach is particularly promising since both management and futures studies investigate how to engage with uncertainty and chart more desirable futures. We illustrate the instrumental role of futures literacy and foresight with an educational program built at the intersection of entrepreneurial and social value creation and with anticipatory practices at its core. We suggest that anticipatory practices are currently underutilized in business schools’ curricula, outreach activities, and strategy making, and may be necessary to shape productive and constructive business schools of the future.
Higher education has been criticised for its instrumental character, which constrains possibilities for meaningful change towards sustainability. Drawing on the concept of radical futurity, we develop a conception of education that we call "emergentist education". We integrate literature from futures studies, education for sustainable development, philosophy of education, and bring into dialogue experiences from three futures-facing educational contexts at a Swedish university. We identify three key areas to conceive of emergentist education and its value in practice: disciplinary and institutional norms, convening around anticipatory emotions, and deepening the paradox of sustainability as emergent through radical futurity. We apply a diffractive analysis through these key areas to demonstrate how a reorientation of education as emergentist might allow students and teachers to contest visions of futures. This work helps in approaching the liberation of education to allow young people to come together whole-heartedly around what matters to them.
Since March 2020, French Business Schools have been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic due to imposed sanitary restrictions. Higher education deployed different online and offline teaching settings to ensure the continuity of students’ learning. Literature proposes hybrid teaching, which combines face-to-face activities with online technology enhanced activities as the way forward for business schools to prepare students for a hybrid business world. Nevertheless, the study identifies cultural constraints that have both built resistance to change from tutors and a consumer-based attitude to learning from students, causing significant pedagogical challenges. This qualitative study reviews the limits of the current approach to hybrid learning and its future direction. The content analysis provides novel insights into hybrid teaching and a unique dimension to knowledge optimisation. A new post-pandemic hybrid teaching and learning conceptual model is proposed that offers students an innovative learning experience within their social context.
It is considered to be crucial for firms to incorporate the notion of sustainability in their business to achieve success in today's ever-changing commercial world. Hence, it is essential that students' awareness of sustainability and related actions is enhanced by embedding this notion in the curriculum in 21st century business education. Guidelines for developing a sustainability-based curriculum are provided in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Since previous researchers have mentioned the need to move the development of a sustainability curriculum in higher education institutions (HEIs) to the experimental stage, the aim of this study was to enhance the sustainability learning outcomes of undergraduate students in business programmes based on designing a PRME-based ESD course. 96 students participated in a quasi-experimental intervention. The project performance of both the experimental group (EG) and control group (CG) was used as a pre-test and post-test, and the results indicated that the students' sustainability learning outcomes were effectively enhanced by the PRME-based ESD course. Therefore, the PRME can be used as a framework for the reform of the business curriculum for sustainability, and the ESD's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 8, 9, 11, 12, and 17 can be undergraduate business students' basic learning objectives.
The set of scenarios presented in this report is one of the outcomes of a 4-year-long research project titled ‘The future of business education’¹. The main goal of the project was to map unfolding trends which may affect the future of higher education in general and business education in particular. The scenarios emerged after we investigated the relationships of specific trends (concerning
society and the field of education) and are intended to facilitate (inter-)organisational learning.
Analysis of the quality of the learning process is very important in teaching and learning activities in ensuring and maintaining the quality of learning well. In the teaching and learning process, the quality assurance instrument or learning quality is an instrument or tool that aims to improve quality in the education sector through observations and assessments produced by research on students. The objective of this research is to test the quality of the online learning process during the Covid-19 pandemic at the Faculty of Engineering (FT) of the State University of Surabaya (Unesa) towards a Legal Entity Higher Education (PTN-BH). The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative which aims to find out social phenomena from the point of view of students and lecturers. The result of this study is that from the ten statements given to respondents, all shown positive results. it can be concluded that Faculty of Engineering students and lecturers support Unesa to become a Legal Entity State University.
Study aims to describe and analyze of blended learning implementation in learning activities. The method applied in this research is a literature review that is sourced from the results of previous studies that have been selected from Google Scholars. The steps applied in this study are identifying journals/articles about blended learning, analyzing the definition of blended learning, synthesizing opportunities and activities in implementation of blended learning, analyzing barriers to implementing blended learning, and making conclusions. From the results of the analysis of 30 selected works of literature, the implementation of blended learning can be done by teaching it as a learning model, teaching it by combining it with other learning strategies or models, teaching it with the help of an LMS, and teaching it with the help of social media. Furthermore, the application of blended learning is able to support activities that can train students' 21st century skills. The implementation of blended learning requires careful planning and requires an understanding of student characteristics and the availability of supporting facilities and infrastructure. This study can provide an overview of the opportunities to apply blended learning in learning activities.
This paper describes open learning and teaching materials, so-called open educational resources (OER), as visualizing, economic and normative objects, and classifies these into a plenum with interwoven practices and arrangements of material (Schatzki). The plenum determines how the actors, their socio-material practices, and the associated political and technical frameworks each generate different interpretations of OER for the actors. The discussion is based on a case study of a video platform providing academic content. The empirical example, studied via document analysis and content analysis, of the TIB AV portal as an educational infrastructure offering videos of scientific conferences and teaching as an online service shows how the normative requirements to open educational resources are produced by the infrastructure. The paper focuses on the argument that the normative dimension of OER be part of material arrangements. The normative OER model is implemented in the infrastructure, while the social norms of openness are provided by the service. OER in terms of normative objects embodying the norm of openness are produced performatively through repositories.
In our digital multi-option society, material, social and emotional needs are
satisfied to a significant extent through offers from the profit-oriented and highly
digitized market system. Social media emerges as a relatively new meta-level between
market and consumer regarding the complex factors influencing individual
consumption routines. Social media influencers are a central factor in these dynamics
as they serve as points of orientation for young people, who are regularly exposed to
influencer content on social media platforms and the values and ideologies they reflect
and reproduce. Young people’s consumption choices regarding nutrition, too, are
significantly influenced by their socialization on social media. For nutrition and
consumer education, this means that educators need a deeper understanding of the
impact of influencers’ media content on the nutritional and consumer behavior of
children and adolescents in order to grasp their key role as reference points and
symbolic power. The EKo-K.I.S.S. project, supported by the ‘Zukunftsfonds
Steiermark’, addresses this issue by developing media-didactic concepts for nutrition
and consumer education at schools and universities based on social science studies.
This paper contributes to this project by addressing the role of influencers and its
implications for the development of teaching competence in nutrition and consumer
education. Based on results of a quantitative survey amongst Styrian pupils and
educators, it shows the importance of this topic in education and points out ways of
integrating it in educational practice.
This paper discusses how leading innovative universities and their master's programmes reflect rapidly changing social-economic technological trends. The increasing focus on the STEM subjects, the changing profile of business and MBA programmes, and the ratio of interdisciplinarity provide insights into the development of future-oriented higher education. In the scope of this study, 2,708 master's programmes were surveyed globally based on their online representation, and 1,750 training programmes from this list were analysed in terms of employability rankings. According to our findings, Western Europe offers the largest number of master's programmes. STEM studies are overrepresented at the top innovative universities, and interdisciplinary studies account for fifteen percent of the programmes. Additionally, business studies with interdisciplinary programmes were identified in a higher proportion as compared to business-only studies. The findings signal the labour market's preferences toward future-oriented, personalised and responsive knowledge. The present study contributes to future education through a global analysis, and supports the strategy creation of higher education institutions (HEIs). Therefore, this article is especially informative to representatives, policy makers or researchers at future-oriented HEIs.
En un contexto de incertidumbre social, política y económica, es inevitable preguntarse si la estrategia de desarrollo que nuestro país ha seguido hasta ahora nos permitirá alcanzar las metas de prosperidad e igualdad de oportunidades que anhela un porcentaje mayoritario de los ciudadanos. Nosotros creemos que difícilmente será posible alcanzar ese objetivo a menos que Chile logre transformarse en una “sociedad del conocimiento”. Para ello será necesario hacer confluir una serie de factores entre los que destacan una mayor capacidad de cultivar y crear conocimientos y contar con una fuerza laboral que posee una “masa crítica” de lo que se ha denominado “capital humano avanzado”.
Recently, several expectations have been raised towards higher education institutions (HEIs). These expectations are about the roles HEIs should play and responsibilities they should have in society. This article focuses on three different responses. The first section touches upon the organisational template of the entrepreneurial university concerning the economic role of HEIs. Secondly, issues of teaching and present HEIs' attempts to respond to the expectations in relation to human value creation are discussed. Thirdly, social engagement and open science is investigated as a response to the question of societal value creation. Finally, in connection with these topics, the article touches upon the possible consequences of organisational homogeneity and heterogeneity to HE in general.
This report is the third part of a Horizon Scanning series by the Future of Higher Education Research Centre at Budapest Business School. It addresses the changes and drivers related to the certification of knowledge, or more precisely, the kind of knowledge higher education provides and/or the labour market needs and the various forms in which it can be certified.
The existing evaluation models for the teaching ability of college art teachers are unadaptable, unsystematic and incomplete. To solve these problems, this paper puts forward a novel model to evaluate the adaptive teaching ability of college art teachers. Firstly, the teaching demand of college art teachers was analyzed in the knowledge age, highlighting the necessity to evaluate the adaptive teaching ability of college art teachers. Next, an evaluation system was established for the adaptive teaching ability of college art teachers in the knowledge age, and different types of evaluation indices were identified. On this basis, the grey relational analysis (GRA) was introduced to build an evaluation model for the adaptive teaching ability of college art teachers. The GRA-based evaluation model enjoys good operability and feasibility. To sum up, this paper fully integrates the evaluation system and evaluation model for the adaptive teaching ability of college art teachers. The research results have great significance in terms of theoretical innovations and practical applications.
This report is the second part of a series by the Future of Higher Education Research Centre at Budapest Business School. It addresses the changes and drivers related to the challenge of flexible learning in HE. It starts with a short description of the present state, then outlines some major issues and initiatives regarding the increasing demand for flexible learning. Finally, it introduces three forms of flexible operation concerning
higher education institutions in order to initiate individual reflections and collective discussions about the future of HE.
The Future of Higher Education Research Centre at Budapest Business School started a Horizon Scanning Report Series which aims to find answers to the question ‘What trends can be identified affecting the future of higher education (HE) based on academic and semi-academic discourses?’. The abrupt change in HE (just as in any other spheres of our lives) due to the COVID19 global pandemic made this exercise more urgent and topical. Therefore, we decided to publish our initial collections to help orienting the different stakeholders in HE.
In the first volume we collected the changes and drivers related to the knowledge transfer role of higher education .
Purpose
This study aims to identify and explore the nature of ideas of the university in the present to demonstrate how the ideas both enable and constrain the emergence of its possible futures.
Design/methodology/approach
An integrated literature review of work on the western university was undertaken to identify the defining elements of ideas discussed in the literature – purpose, social legitimacy and embedded future – for the university in each idea.
Findings
Four contested and co-existing ideas of the university in the present were identified, and the nature of their co-existence and their underpinning assumptions about the purpose and social legitimacy and the embedded future held by each idea are made explicit.
Research limitations/implications
The paper focuses only on public, non-profit western universities as they exist in Australia, Europe, the UK, Canada and the USA in the present. Whether other forms of the university such as private non-profit and private for-profit “fit” into the four ideas and university types identified here was not explored and is a topic for future research.
Originality/value
The paper draws on an extensive literature to identify a new frame to understand the evolution of multiple ideas of the university, the impact of these ideas on the empirical organisational form of the university and how they shape assumptions about the university’s possible futures.
Higher education for the 21st century continues to promote discoveries in the field through learning analytics (LA). The problem is that the rapid embrace of of LA diverts educators' attention from clearly identifying requirements and implications of using LA in higher education. LA is a promising emerging field, yet higher education stakeholders need to become further familiar with issues related to the use of LA in higher education. Few studies have synthesized previous studies to provide an overview of LA issues in higher education. To address the problem, a systemic literature review was conducted to provide an overview of methods, benefits, and challenges of using LA in higher education. The literature review revealed that LA uses various methods including visual data analysis techniques, social network analysis, semantic, and educational data mining including prediction, clustering, relationship mining, discovery with models, and separation of data for human judgment to analyze data. The benefits include targeted course offerings, curriculum development, student learning outcomes, behavior and process, personalized learning, improved instructor performance, post-educational employment opportunities, and enhanced research in the field of education. Challenges include issues related to data tracking, collection, evaluation, analysis; lack of connection to learning sciences; optimizing learning environments, and ethical and privacy issues. Such a comprehensive overview provides an integrative report for faculty, course developers, and administrators about methods, benefits, and challenges of LA so that they may apply LA more effectively to improve teaching and learning in higher education.
Significance
Social media sites are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that prevent people from being exposed to information that contradicts their preexisting beliefs. We conducted a field experiment that offered a large group of Democrats and Republicans financial compensation to follow bots that retweeted messages by elected officials and opinion leaders with opposing political views. Republican participants expressed substantially more conservative views after following a liberal Twitter bot, whereas Democrats’ attitudes became slightly more liberal after following a conservative Twitter bot—although this effect was not statistically significant. Despite several limitations, this study has important implications for the emerging field of computational social science and ongoing efforts to reduce political polarization online.
Attacks on academic freedom in Turkey have become increasingly systematic in recent years and thousands of academics have been dismissed. This study reflects on the effects of this worsening repression through interviews with academics in the social sciences, both those dismissed and those still active in their profession. Although the dismissed academics are socially in a very precarious position, they are continuing their scholarly activities in alternative, underground forms. This resistance stands in contrast to the accommodation and self-censorship that seem, according to the interviewees, to prevail in university departments.
Academic Freedom in Europe: The Central European University Affair and the Wider Lessons - Volume 58 Issue 3 - Anne Corbett, Claire Gordon
The future of the higher education sector in general, and that of higher education institutions in particular is both troubling and uncertain. At the moment, it seems that there are several social, political, economic and technological trends which really test the sector's and the institutions' adaptive capacities. These challenges have brought forth a number of papers and reports about the changing role and organisational structure of these institutions. We would like to contribute to this discussion by summarising the results of our participatory project concerning the future of higher education. The project started in 2014 and included two participatory backcasting workshops involving lecturers and students. The aim of our paper is to discuss the results of the participatory research project that involved key stakeholders on envisioning the future of higher education. The differences between the views of the lecturers and the students stress the importance of involving different stakeholder groups in the discussion about the future of higher education. As far as the different perspectives are concerned, two key points are worth highlighting: the open vs closed nature of higher education and in relation to this an inward looking, organisational vs an outward looking, network-focused perspective. These opposing viewpoints not only show differing visions of the future but also reveal current tensions between key stakeholders about what role should higher education institutions play in the social and economic environments.
Like in many other Central and Eastern European countries, in 2016, Romanian populist parties were voted by the 'silent' citizens, by those feeling deprived and not represented properly. Shortly before that, in 2015, the tragic Colectiv nightclub fire had given birth to a new party: Save Romania Union (USR) that promotes a populist discourse on the 'corrupt elite' versus the 'pure people'. At the beginning, however, the new party did not disseminate messages specific to the nationalist or radical right-wing populists. Another party, endorsed by a news television channel Romania TV, almost succeeded at overpassing the electoral threshold in the 2016 parliamentary election: United Romania Party (PRU) used xenophobic and anti-EU messages during the 2016 general election campaign. My hypothesis is that the extremist electoral messages, the expressions of hatred towards foreigners and Western businessmen or the EU institutions were spread through social networks. Using a content analysis, I shall verify the extent to which the official Facebook pages of the Social Democratic Party (PSD, the direct successor of the Romanian Communist Party), the United Romania Party (PRU) and the Save Romania Union (USR) reflected the antagonism of the 'pure' people versus the 'corrupt' elite and I shall reveal who these parties identified as the so-called 'people's enemies'.
Our paper deals with how elite corporate actors in a Western capitalist-democratic society conceive of and prepare for the future. Paying attention to how senior officers of ten important Danish companies make sense of the future will help us to identify how particular temporal narratives are ideologically marked. This ideological dimension offers a common sense frame that is structured around a perceived inevitability of capitalism, a market economy as the basic organizational structure of the social and economic order, and an assumption of confident access to the future. Managers envisage their organization’s future and make plans for organizational action in a space where ‘business as usual’ reigns, and there is little engagement with the future as fundamentally open; as a time-yet-to-come. In using a conceptual lens inspired by the work of Fredric Jameson, we first explore the details of this presentism and a particular colonization of the future, and then linger over small disruptions in the narratives of our interviewees which point to what escapes or jars their common sense frame, explore the implicit meanings they assign to their agency, and also find clues and traces of temporal actions and strategies in their narratives that point to a subtly different engagement with time.
Unbundling is the process through which products previously sold together are separated into their constituent parts. In higher education, this dynamic has been driven primarily by financial motivations, and spearheaded by the for-profit sector, but also has pedagogical motivations through its emphasis on personalisation and employability. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the trend, proposing new conceptual tools with which to map the normative implications. While appearing to offer the prospect of financial viability and increased relevance, unbundling presents some worrying signs for universities: first, the removal of possible synergies between teaching and research, and between different modes of learning; second, the undermining of the ability of institutions to promote the public good and ensure equality of opportunity; and third, the threat of hyperporosity to the conducting of basic research with long-term benefits.
Academic freedom is both a core value and a governing principle of higher education institutions. However, more recently, governments in places generally deemed democratic have labeled universities as threats. The recent legislative change in Hungary represents a particularly worrying example.
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In this paper, we try to answer the question of whether political polarization in the US on Twitter has increased over the last eight years. We analyze a large longitudinal Twitter dataset of 679,000 users and look at signs of polarization in their (i) network - how people follow political and media accounts, (ii) tweeting behavior - whether they retweet content from both sides, and (iii) content - how partisan the hashtags they use are. Our analysis shows that online polarization has indeed increased over the past eight years and that, depending on the measure, the relative change is 10%-20%. Our study is one of very few with such a long-term perspective, encompassing two US presidential elections and two mid-term elections, providing a rare longitudinal analysis.
This article analyses the changes in international student mobility from the lens of three overlapping waves spread over seven years between 1999 and 2020. Here a wave is defined by the key events and trends impacting international student mobility within temporal periods. Wave I was shaped by the terrorist attacks of 2001 and enrolment of international students at institutions seeking to build research excellence. Wave II was shaped by the global financial recession which triggered financial motivations for recruiting international students. Wave III is being shaped by the slowdown in the Chinese economy, UK’s referendum to leave the European Union and American Presidential elections. The trends for Wave III show increasing competition among new and traditional destinations to attract international students. The underlying drivers and characteristics of the three waves suggest that institutions are under increasing financial and competitive pressure to attract and retain international students. Going forward, institutions must innovate not only to grow international student enrolment but also balance it with corresponding support services that advance student success including expectations of career and employability outcomes.
Research has never been more central to the mission of the university, and research performance is the primary factor that regulates university status and is seen to signify the innovation “firepower” of the global competition state. A striking feature of the present period is the growing pluralization of research power as more nations and institutions secure a prominent role in world science, especially nations in East Asia. Yet, paradoxically, even while research has become ever more central, to the point where its symbolic and economic importance have been markedly exaggerated, the policy conception of university research has gravely narrowed. With all the focus falling on science and technology, especially of an applied kind, there is insufficient attention given to the social sciences and to the broader role of creative and interpretative scholarship, including work in the humanities and the arts. Nor is the economistic performative model that dominates research management and funding optimal for creative work in science and technology. We also need to ask questions about whether that model is optimal for the spread of knowledge within universities, and its broader social dissemination, including relations between university and non-university research. On the positive side, the immense growth of open-source knowledge, and spread of research knowledge through that medium, underpins the wide rollout of capacity in social innovation.
Global sustainability problems pose serious challenges for humanity. In handling these problems education for sustainable development (ESD) is seen as important. Different key competences that ESD should focus on have been introduced, such as the ability to deal with future dimensions. Still, studies indicate that future dimensions are not always included in ESD and that many young people are pessimistic concerning the global future. Therefore, one could argue that a focus on anticipatory emotions, especially hope, should be included in ESD. There is a worry, however, that hope will lead to unrealistic optimism and/or less engagement. The aim of this paper is to problematize the discussion about hope in relation to ESD and the global future by grounding it in theories from different disciplines and in empirical research about young people, hope, and climate change. The review shows that hope is a complex, multifaceted, and sometimes contested concept. Hope can be related to denial, but in other cases it can help people face and do something constructive with their worries about the global future. The close relation between hope and trust is emphasized and a need for critical emotional awareness in ESD is argued for.
The question of why we should promote engaged learning is often answered with reference to the broader civic mission of the public university. Without doubt, normative imperatives to enhance the world in which we are living should and do underlie the drive toward engaged learning. We might, however, also want to recognise a reason to promote engaged learning that emerges from a less disinterested perspective, one that locates it at the heart of the research mission of the university. In other words, it is possible to understand engaged learning as a process that both mirrors and contributes to many of the methods by which academics are conducting research today. Engaged learning, from this perspective, is neither ‘service’ nor simply pedagogic innovation, but is a mode of teaching and learning that distinctively models and reflects contemporary research practices and, as such, it is an approach that is particularly important for research intensive universities.
Higher education for the 21st century continues to promote discoveries in the field through learning analytics (LA). The problem is that the rapid embrace of of LA diverts educators’ attention from clearly identifying requirements and implications of using LA in higher education. LA is a promising emerging field, yet higher education stakeholders need to become further familiar with issues related to the use of LA in higher education. Few studies have synthesized previous studies to provide an overview of LA issues in higher education. To address the problem, a systemic literature review was conducted to provide an overview of methods, benefits, and challenges of using LA in higher education. The literature review revealed that LA uses various methods including visual data analysis techniques, social network analysis, semantic, and educational data mining including prediction, clustering, relationship mining, discovery with models, and separation of data for human judgment to analyze data. The benefits include targeted course offerings, curriculum development, student learning outcomes, behavior and process, personalized learning, improved instructor performance, post-educational employment opportunities, and enhanced research in the field of education. Challenges include issues related to data tracking, collection, evaluation, analysis; lack of connection to learning sciences; optimizing learning environments, and ethical and privacy issues. Such a comprehensive overview provides an integrative report for faculty, course developers, and administrators about methods, benefits, and challenges of LA so that they may apply LA more effectively to improve teaching and learning in higher education.
This chapter argues that Universities face becoming redundant unless the way teaching and learning takes place changes. Drawing on inspiration from Gramsci and Friere, the authors provides the conceptual linchpin for the rest of the book and introduce the idea that the higher education pedagogy needs to focus not just on the transfer of disciplinary content, but on developing our students into Citizen Scholars. Through proposing a set of graduate proficiencies and attributes, the authors give meaning to the concept of the Citizen Scholar and offer a way to ‘future-proof’ higher education.
The future of higher education is in question as universities struggle to remain relevant to the present and future needs of society. The context in which learning occurs is rapidly changing and those engaged and interested in the place and position of university education must learn to adapt. This book embodies a vision for higher education where graduate attributes and proficiencies are at the core of the academic project, where degree programs move beyond disciplinary context and where students are encouraged to be Citizen Scholars. Through a series of cross-disciplinary and contextual cases, the contributors to this book articulate how this vision can be achieved in our pedagogical environments, future-proofing higher education.
Current uses of robots in classrooms are reviewed and used to characterise four scenarios: (s1) Robot as Classroom Teacher; (s2) Robot as Companion and Peer; (s3) Robot as Care-eliciting Companion; and (s4) Telepresence Robot Teacher. The main ethical concerns associated with robot teachers are identified as: privacy; attachment, deception, and loss of human contact; and control and accountability. These are discussed in terms of the four identified scenarios. It is argued that classroom robots are likely to impact children’s’ privacy, especially when they masquerade as their friends and companions, when sensors are used to measure children’s responses, and when records are kept. Social robots designed to appear as if they understand and care for humans necessarily involve some deception (itself a complex notion), and could increase the risk of reduced human contact. Children could form attachments to robot companions (s2 and s3), or robot teachers (s1) and this could have a deleterious effect on their social development. There are also concerns about the ability, and use of robots to control or make decisions about children’s behaviour in the classroom. It is concluded that there are good reasons not to welcome fully fledged robot teachers (s1), and that robot companions (s2 and 3) should be given a cautious welcome at best. The limited circumstances in which robots could be used in the classroom to improve the human condition by offering otherwise unavailable educational experiences are discussed.
Universities hold a crucial responsibility and role to contribute to sustainable development, also in their education task. The concept of competencies for sustainable development and the idea of using real-world sustainability issues in education are promising approaches to transform sustainability programmes at universities into student-centred learning environments. Especially the educational formats of problem-based learning and project-based learning foster such a process of educational innovation towards student-centred learning. Moreover, hybrid forms of problem- and project-based learning offer added value, but challenges for PPBL courses in sustainability remain salient
Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world’s students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.
This volume collects and analyzes eleven country case studies of polarized polities that are, or had been, electoral democracies, identifying the common and differing causal mechanisms that lead to different outcomes for democracy when a society experiences polarization. In this introduction, we discuss our goals for the volume, the comparative logic we apply to the cases, our overall methodological approach, and the concepts that ground the analyses. The goal of this volume is to explore pernicious polarization, i.e., when and how a society divides into mutually distrustful “us vs. them” blocs, which endangers democracy. Accordingly, we discuss the effects of such polarization on democracies, and start building a foundation for remedies. In this introductory article, we highlight and explain the inherently political and relational aspects of polarization in general and pernicious polarization in particular, present the concept of formative rifts, and discuss how opposition strategies should be part of an explanation of severe polarization. © 2019 by The American Academy of Political and Social Science.
While the EU referendum vote put the political divide between Britain’s towns and cities into the spotlight, this divide is the product of long-term forces of social and economic change. In this chapter, we show how geographical polarisation has and continues to reshape British politics, in the diverging trends between those places that have experienced relative decline and those that have thrived. Not only do these changes have electoral consequences for the major parties in Westminster they pose particular challenges in terms of public policy.
Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent ‘elective affinity’ between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at the time of a ‘mass web’ involving billions of people worldwide, provide a suitable channel for the mass politics and the appeals to the people typical of populism. But this affinity also needs to be understood in light of the rebellious narrative that has come to be associated with social media at times in which rapid technological development has coincided with a profound economic crisis, shaking the legitimacy of the neoliberal order. This question is explored by examining the role acquired by social media in populist movements as the people’s voice and the people’s rally, providing, on the one hand, with a means for disaffected individuals to express themselves and, on the other hand, with a space in which disgruntled Internet users could gather and form partisan online crowds.
Persistent poverty, economic decay, and lack of opportunities are at the root of considerable discontent in declining and lagging-behind areas the world over. Poor development prospects and an increasing belief that these places have ‘no future’ – as economic dynamism has been posited to be increasingly dependent on agglomeration economies – have led many of these so-called ‘places that don’t matter’ to revolt against the status quo. The revolt has come via an unexpected source: the ballot-box in a wave of political populism with strong territorial, rather than social foundations. I will argue that the populist wave is challenging the sources of existing well-being in both the less-dynamic and the more prosperous areas and that better, rather than more, place-sensitive territorial development policies are needed in order to find a solution to the problem. Place-sensitive development policies need, however, to stay clear of the welfare, income-support, and big investment projects of past development strategies if they are to be successful and focus on tapping into untapped potential and on providing opportunities to those people living in the places that ‘don’t matter’.
Persistent poverty, economic decay and lack of opportunities are at the root of considerable discontent in declining and lagging-behind areas the world over. Poor development prospects and an increasing belief that these places have "no future"-as economic dynamism has been posited to be increasingly dependent on agglomeration economies-have led many of these so-called "places that don't matter" to revolt against the status quo. The revolt has come via an unexpected source: the ballot-box, in a wave of political populism with strong territorial, rather than social foundations. I will argue that the populist wave is challenging the sources of existing well-being in both the less-dynamic and the more prosperous areas and that better, rather than more, place-sensitive territorial development policies are needed in order to find a solution to the problem. Place-sensitive development policies need, however, to stay clear of the welfare, income support and big investment projects of past development strategies if they are to be successful and focus on tapping into untapped potential and on providing opportunities to those people living in the places that "don't matter".
How far do recent innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence herald an unprecedented economic and social transformation? This article provides a critical evaluation of this question, challenging the relentless technological determinism of much debate, and reframing the issues involved within a political-economic and sociological approach. This focuses on the economic, political and historical dynamics of technological innovation, and its consequences for employment and economic re-structuring, mediated through sovereign and discursive power. A range of epistemological and empirical problems with the transformationist position are identified, and an alternative perspective proposed emphasizing complexity and uncertainty around contemporary and future trends.
Higher education is in a critical period with a potential for a major rebalancing of internal and external relations of authority, power and responsibility in higher education governance. An important element in this transition has been a growing policy focus on the contributions higher education institutions are expected to make to economic growth, job creation and innovation.
It has been a real pleasure for me to come to the CHER 2013 conference held in Lausanne. I first would like to thank Christine Musselin, as the CHER president, and Gaële Goastellec, as the conference organiser, for their invitation to think more systematically about the question of the potential impact of University, Higher Education and Research on the well-being of societies.
Advanced capitalist societies are characterized by three forms of power and powerlessness: a hegemony of political monoculture; the ‘undoing’ of democratic forms of political agency and subjects; and the ‘political construction of hopelessness’ in challenging these structural foreclosures and ideological consensus. In this context, how can learning enable collective survival in the present and enlarge possibilities for yet-unimaginable alternative futures to emerge? This paper explores this question by juxtaposing three models of educational futurity in different neoliberal contexts. The first, dominating state education policy and practice in Anglospheric and specifically British institutions, promotes performative and disciplinary regimes of anticipation. The second, circulating in discourse and in experimental spaces within this hegemonic context, advocates an emergentist, critical and creative relationship to the future. The third, which thrives in the margins and relative exteriorities of the capitalist world system, promotes an ecological, epistemically disobedient and utopian mode of anticipatory consciousness which ‘projects emancipation beyond the constraints of the existing discourse’ of colonial modernity. We do not attempt to compare these different contexts and models in this paper, but to read each for its difference to illustrate that modes of anticipation in education influence the construction of hopelessness and hope by shaping what is learned about the nature of political possibility and the relationship between learning and the future. We argue that pedagogies which embrace critical modes of anticipation offer alternatives to contemporary regimes of anticipation in education in Britain today.
This paper engages with the challenge of re-imagining higher education. We start from the position that the ascent of the increasingly corporatized university is deeply problematic precisely because of the neoliberal realist position on ‘the future’ that it assumes and perpetuates: the view that there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalist market principles, that present and future realities can diverge only to the extent permitted by existing market forces and rationales (Amsler, 2011). In this context, ‘education’ takes the form of preparing and socializing the next generation of workers: a future focus severely limited in the possibilities it considers. Thus we are faced with a mutually-constitutive relationship where constrained visions of future needs and demands serve to constrain present educational offerings; a dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing and which admits little disruption. In this paper, we draw on the concrete body of practice known as action research to consider how we might prize open spaces for thinking much more expansively about what ‘the future’ might entail, and what forms of education and organization are necessary in the present to keep open, rather than shut down, diverse possibilities and democratic debate around this. We focus on critical utopian action research and systemic action research as illustrative of key qualities of prefigurative and critical utopian engagement with educational presents and futures. We conclude that the capture of the university by neoliberal logics can be resisted and challenged through radical methodologies, like action research, which explicitly set out to be ongoingly anti-hegemonic, critical, self-reflexive, pluralistic, and non-recuperative (Firth, 2013; Garforth, 2009).
In this chapter we elaborate on how, as a research intensive Australian metropolitan university, Macquarie University responded to global and local pressures and the wicked problems these present to develop an undergraduate curriculum that aspires to be distinctive, intellectually challenging, and community-engaged: one that meets the needs – personal and professional – of students as they transition into a world of complex social and technological change. We trace the path by which the Professional and Community Engagement (PACE) program, a central plank of the re-imagined curriculum, was conceived. We describe PACE’s conceptual antecedents in an interconnected array of pedagogical approaches and philosophical conceptions of the purpose of higher education united by a common belief in the efficacy of engaged, experiential learning. We chart the initial phases of the program’s implementation and argue that PACE is proving to be a significant contributor to and differentiator of Macquarie University in terms of student experience and capability, and applied, community-engaged learning.
Unprecedented global forces are shaping the health and wellbeing of the largest generation of 10 to 24 year olds in human history. Population mobility, global communications, economic development, and the sustainability of ecosystems are setting the future course for this generation and, in turn, humankind. At the same time, we have come to new understandings of adolescence as a critical phase in life for achieving human potential. Adolescence is characterised by dynamic brain development in which the interaction with the social environment shapes the capabilities an individual takes forward into adult life.3 During adolescence, an individual acquires the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and economic resources that are the foundation for later life health and wellbeing. These same resources define trajectories into the next generation. Investments in adolescent health and wellbeing bring benefits today, for decades to come, and for the next generation. Better childhood health and nutrition, extensions to education, delays in family formation, and new technologies offer the possibility of this being the healthiest generation of adolescents ever. But these are also the ages when new and different health problems related to the onset of sexual activity, emotional control, and behaviour typically emerge. Global trends include those promoting unhealthy lifestyles and commodities, the crisis of youth unemployment, less family stability, environmental degradation, armed conflict, and mass migration, all of which pose major threats to adolescent health and wellbeing. Adolescents and young adults have until recently been overlooked in global health and social policy, one reason why they have had fewer health gains with economic development than other age groups. The UN Secretary-General's Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health initiated, in September, 2015, presents an outstanding opportunity for investment in adolescent health and wellbeing. However, because of limits to resources and technical capacities at both the national and the global level, effective response has many challenges. The question of where to make the most effective investments is now pressing for the international development community. This Commission outlines the opportunities and challenges for investment at both country and global levels (panel 1).
The growth in online and distance education has focused increased attention on unbundling faculty roles in delivering instruction, yet unbundling related to faculty work has been occurring in higher education for over three centuries. In this paper, we examine unbundling of the faculty role in higher education to provide scholars, university leaders, faculty, disciplinary leaders, and policy makers with historical context, theoretical frameworks, and gaps in the empirical literature to inform research and decision-making pertaining to the differentiation of university and faculty tasks. We describe unbundling historically in order to highlight how the faculty role has shifted over time, demonstrating this is not a new phenomenon. We also review theoretical frameworks and their mechanisms to inform our understanding of the history and future of unbundling and suggest the importance of multiple theories to best understand this complex phenomenon. We then examine the limited empirical research findings on unbundling the faculty role, which have not been synthesized to date. We conclude by offering directions for future research regarding unbundling based on the history, theory, and empirical research reviewed, as well as recommendations for policy.
The initial vision for intelligent tutoring systems involved powerful, multi-faceted systems that would leverage rich models of students and pedagogies to create complex learning interactions. But the intelligent tutoring systems used at scale today are much simpler. In this article, I present hypotheses on the factors underlying this development, and discuss the potential of educational data mining driving human decision-making as an alternate paradigm for online learning, focusing on intelligence amplification rather than artificial intelligence.
This paper focuses on climate-induced migration. We construct a simple theoretical model where, in a first step, climate shocks accelerate the transition from the traditional to the modern sector, leading rural workers to move to urban centres within national borders, while in a second step, downward pressures on wages due to the greater labour supply in cities push people to engage in international migration. To test this hypothesis, we exploit a rich panel dataset, displaying a representative picture of bilateral migration flows and climatic data across 222 countries for the period 1960–2000. Findings suggest that in the next few years the climate-induced growth rate of migrant stocks might be in a range between 8.6 per cent and 12.8 per cent, especially from developing countries, where the level of rural employment is more likely to be affected by climatic shocks.
In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. Drawing on the stories of troubling--and hopeful--educational developments from around the world, Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.
This chapter reviews how higher learning systems have developed in the east as well as in the west. Although the word “university” originated from the medieval university, the idea of higher learning dates back to ancient times. The chapter also reviews how the ancient ideals of higher learning were incorporated into the medieval university, and how the medieval university ideal was, in turn, incorporated into the modern university. Through this historical overview, the chapter provides a broader view on the development of the modern university. In addition, this chapter conceptualizes contemporary higher education as post-massification, and then compares how post-massification differs from elite and mass higher education in terms of teaching and research. Finally, this chapter discusses how global rankings and the world-class university profoundly change the identity of the modern university.
The question of what living is for-of what one should care about and why-is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life's most important question to an honored place in higher education. The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers. In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years. Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities' lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.
In this controversial new book, Daisy Christodoulou offers a thought-provoking critique of educational orthodoxy. Drawing on her recent experience of teaching in challenging schools, she shows through a wide range of examples and case studies just how much classroom practice contradicts basic scientific principles. She examines seven widely-held beliefs which are holding back pupils and teachers:
The metamorphosis of the world is about the hidden emancipatory side effect of global risk. This article argues that the talk about bads produces ‘common goods’. As such, the argument goes beyond what has been at the heart of the world risk society theory so far: it is not about the negative side effects of goods but the positive side effects of bads. They are producing normative horizons of common goods. This is what the author defines as ‘emancipatory catastrophism’. Emancipatory catastrophism can be seen and analysed by using three conceptual lenses: first, the anticipation of global catastrophe violates sacred (unwritten) norms of human existence and civilization; second, thereby it causes an anthropological shock, and, third, a social catharsis.
The centrality of engagement is critical to the success of higher education in the future. Engagement is essential to most effectively achieving the overall purpose of the university, which is focused on the knowledge enterprise. Today's engagement is scholarly, is an aspect of learning and discovery, and enhances society and higher education. Undergirding today's approach to community engagement is the understanding that not all knowledge and expertise resides in the academy, and that both expertise and great learning opportunities in teaching and scholarship also reside in non-academic settings. By recommitting to their societal contract, public and land-grant universities can fulfill their promise as institutions that produce knowledge that benefits society and prepares students for productive citizenship in a democratic society. This new engagement also posits a new framework for scholarship that moves away from emphasizing products to emphasizing impact.