Revisiting the University System of Georgia Scenarios

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Myk Garn contributed to this post.

This post was originally shared on the Lifeboat Foundation website.

The post has been edited and updated for grammar before reposting on SeriousInsights.net.

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Introduction

Higher education is facing a number of challenges in the twenty-first century, including changes in funding models, disruptive technologies, unknowable future skill needs, declining jobs for the high skills and overly specialized and changing education consumer expectations. The learning experience has moved from the classroom to a global network of always-on, always-connected learners and teachers—and most of those learning on the Internet are not enrolled students and teachers, not paid faculty. And Google thinks all questions are good questions.

If colleges and universities extrapolate their futures based on the present practices, architectures and curriculum, they are likely to develop strategies that don’t account for these challenges. They may set broad goals that look aspirational, but they will lack the substance of action required to navigate and leverage the challenges and opportunities of the future.

While Big Data proponents look ever more closely at the minutia of the moment, seeking to take advantage of the past to anticipate the future on grander scales with large uncertainties, Big Data will, at minimum, reinforce current assumptions and, at its worst, suggest wrong outcomes, outcomes that lack the dexterity to adapt as the future actually unfolds.

The University System of Georgia (USG) understands these issues and invests in another path toward grappling with their future. They decided to explore scenarios about the future that paint very different social, economic and political circumstances under which education will exist. Not only did they adopt scenarios as a tool in their strategic quiver, but they also developed an innovative approach to engaging college and university leadership while offering exposure to scenarios to a wide range of learners.

While an internal task force was convened, simultaneously, a Massive Open Online Course or MOOC was developed in order to teach the ideas and techniques behind scenario planning. The MOOC also acted as a virtual workshop experience, taking attendees through the various stages of the scenario process. Their work became the basis for the scenarios.

 The MOOC was divided into two classes. The first, Invent the Beyond, was designed to create the scenarios. The second, Explore the Beyond, was intended to help attendees understand the implications of the scenario for education.  The courses were offered in the Fall of 2014 and the Spring of 2015). Over 500 learners enrolled in the MOOC.

Uncertainties and Drivers

Traditional scenario planning seeks to establish a set of drivers for which certainty is more assured. The process at USG categorized even those things that might be considered certain by some to be uncertainties. This was a critical choice as it led to a scenario that, for instance, countermands drivers that suggest any future will be more technologically sophisticated.

The following uncertainties were chosen as those most critical and most uncertain to the question: What will be the character of learning in 2030? (for a complete list see Appendix 1).

• US competitive position
• Public funding of education
• The national focus on education
• Funding sources for education
• Regulation of education
• Paths to learning
• Credentials/certifications
• Measurement approach
• Sources of learning
• Skills development
• Necessity of education
• Economic policymaking
• Cost of education
• The pace of change and innovation

After online voting, the MOCC chose Sources of Learning, with polls labeled “Closed/Academy” and “Open/Open Source/Co-Created, along with the Pace of Change, which was labeled “Rapid” or “Slow/Managed” at its extremes.

Scenario sets typically avoid uncertainties that specifically relate to the domain in question. This project determined that because learning was defined broadly, and the solution space more specifically, i.e., The strategic direction of the University System of Georgia, ideas more closely related to the domain still provided sufficiently open canvases for exploration.

The scenarios

After the matrix was formed, the remaining highly influential uncertainties, along with other uncertainties that were less highly ranked, were further evaluated as story elements. The instructors collaborated on a set of values for each of the major uncertainties and then submitted those values to the MOOC for affirmation or suggestions of alternative values. Learners were also given an opportunity to comment in general on the uncertainty and its values.

The following scenarios are meant as short introductions designed to invoke a sense of time and place that jars the reader from the present, placing them in an often disorienting, even uncomfortable environment.

Embedded within each scenario is a table that sketches student attributes and behaviors prototypical of each scenario. 

At the time of this paper, the second MOCC is still underway. Work is currently underway to evaluate other aspects of the scenarios, including the behavior and attributes of faculty and the design of institutions. While learning models are outlined in the stories, additional work is also being conducted on learning models and their associated business models. 

As additional elements of these futures are explored, the stories will become richer and more detailed. As they are, however, these stories paint often-disturbing possibilities for the future. Those considering the future of education may invoke threats and opportunities not previously perceived during the normal course of linear extrapolation.

The MOOC, unlike workshops sponsored by a single organization, was free from any internal political influence to create a utopia or align with an institutional vision. This freedom generated not only variety, but a variety of near dystopias that should act as a prod for the optimists to confront futures that disturb their mental models. For pessimists, these scenarios should act as a challenge

Find Your Own Path

Quadrant A (Open-sourced learning and rapid change)

Change is the only constant, and the only way to keep up is by letting technology anticipate what you need

Jovie wakes up before dawn to a news briefing. Ten suspected terrorists have been captured in Barcelona before they were able to execute their plans. A calendar update flashes across her bathroom mirror.  A nutritionally balanced and flavor-preference-matched cereal mix prints while she showers. The refrigerator requests confirmation of its order.  Quick video chats from a fully clothed Jovie avatar begins the workday. By the time she is ready to commute to work, her work queue has been prioritized and segmented based on a model of Jovie’s daily mental rhythms.

Analytics, algorithms, and machine learning have triumphed. Apps now know how to make sense of the world well enough that most people don’t care if a recommendation comes from a person or a program. The program often proves it knows people at their most intimate level of want, need, and desire better than any human. 

Information is everywhere, published by people and by programs. As much as computers have learned to interpret, refine, discover, correlate, and recommend, people remain complex and at the core of content. Authority remains determined by the information receiver. Too often, though, people shrug off that responsibility and accept what they are given. Things must get done. Time is precious and there just isn’t enough of it to question everything. And isn’t that why we created these intelligent applications in the first place?

Student Attributes

Student Behaviors

Entrepreneurial Savvy consumers of higher education Own their own learning Quickly adapts to change, including mastering newly identified competencies High degree of mental flexibility Slow to make decisions w/out external prompts or validation Technologically proficient Self-motivated Often self-taught Self-directed Self-activated Self-driven Self-aware Critical thinking Trusts the appsViews education as a consumable (learners are consumers) Appreciates life-long learning Highly organized Decisive Inquisitive Confident

Demand full input into their degree requirements Use available data to generate a “quantified-self” to maintain self-direction & choice in education Take ownership of knowledge/skills needed Create a marketing persona in order to “sell themselves,” including marketing collateral in the form of “learning portfolios” Develop and maintain strong networks that allow navigate and easily connect with a variety of quality mentors.

The world seems to seethe with change, and it is fast-paced – many people feel that the pace creates constant disruptions, if not on the grand scale, at least on the personal scale. There seems to always be something new to learn, something new to adapt to, something – from devices to skills – that has become obsolete.

In higher education, institutional prestige has been devalued.  Value now resides in the ability to meet the needs of the individual, fueled by the collective “wisdom” of the crowd.  The power of a degree is diminished as workplaces shift to micro-degrees and endorsements that signal the ability to perform specific tasks or the mastery of a specific, narrow knowledge set. Education with the big “E” is being replaced by the adequacy of education with a small “e.” In some ways, everyone is an expert on areas where they have experience, but no one is a gatekeeper for how it all fits together, except the applications that constantly troll for correlations. The sense-making usually makes enough sense to just go with it. The cost of “learning” plummets.

The costs of learning are spread out more evenly over a career, with higher value skills, such as those needed by someone more advanced in their professions, coming at higher costs.  Entry skills are low, and this encourages even more career experimentation and mixing.

Intelligent applications keep track of successes, experiments, personal learning, reading, courses, conferences, concerts and a wide variety of other activities in which people are involved. Learning profiles are derived from all of these activities and integrated with existing profiles from elementary and secondary education. After fourteen years of profiling for most people, the learning apps pretty much know what you know and what you don’t. They also know what lies ahead and how long it likely for you to master something new. When a future activity appears to be challenging to a person’s current profile, the app pieces together a curriculum and suggests to the person when they should start the learning experience. The app also nudges people to keep them on course unless the person mutes that channel.

Although much of education is delivered virtually, either through constructed curriculum with built-in assessments or through human mentors who interact with learners virtually, physical learning experiences have emerged as a differentiator in the space. This does not mean traditional lecture halls attract learners, but that physical, hands-on experiences conducted in a space with other people are highly sought after. Not only does this create a real human experience, but it creates some learning that is beyond the reach of the learning apps, giving people comfort that they still possess some highly personal experiences that aren’t widely shared or transformed into data by the learning apps.

Some people think of this as chaotic, as the learning app may suggest topics far afield from existing knowledge, forcing people to embrace new ideas, concepts and skills while still using their existing ones to provide value to employers or partners.

For those in highly skilled roles, more traditional-looking education and credentialing still exist, but it is highly integrated with just-in-time learning and just-in-time publishing. This means that in science and engineering, in particular, the results of experiments and research no longer take years of vetting and peer review before they are published. It is up to the reader to understand that state of results (i.e., they haven’t been reviewed) and to ask their own questions for clarification in a participatory, open and transparent way. Although this approach exists, one of the roles of higher education is to recognize outstanding personal learning and community leadership by conferring degrees on those who have a proven track record of learning and contribution, regardless of how that learning was achieved. In some ways these “bestowed” degrees are more highly respected than traditional degrees because they represent personal initiative along with learning.

There are challenges for older people in the workforce. They don’t have the deep learning profiles built when they were young, and they have little interest in constantly learning new skills, especially when informed that they need those skills from an app. This puts the US at an economic disadvantage because younger countries are more easily able to adopt and adapt. The massive globalization of labor and the advent of micro-manufacturing, however, has lessened the impact of resistance from older Americans to the emerging approach to work as others around the world are capable, numerous and willing to pick up their slack.

Leading-edge educators are working with learning apps to embed their own approach to learning and critical thinking within the recommendation and analysis engines. Educators who do this offer subscriptions to their “personal takes” on the world, which differentiates them from more generic, open-source analytics. Those who subscribe also have access to private forums and feedback channels that help educators refine their offerings. Some educators have moved beyond personal brands to building businesses that employ people to help them increase the power, use and revenue generated by their subscription services.

For all, there are great assumptions being made about motivational psychology, as contracting organizations expect people to figure out for themselves what they need to learn to remain relevant while hiring organizations expect the same from candidates prior to hiring, at which time the organization exerts more influence. There is a bottom-line assumption that people need to keep up, and those who don’t get left behind. This has created new haves-have-now divided along the lines of those who actively and purposefully adapt to the moment regardless of long-term need and those who have become disenfranchised, concentrating on learning that means something to them if they are motivated to learn anything new at all.

Healthcare has been transformed by the emergence of new, data-driven processes of assessing risk, determining treatments, and developing courses or care, reducing the skill demand for much of the healthcare workforce and extending and improving care for greater numbers of individuals.  Issues of privacy persist, however, as the value of patient data in research and development of new treatments grows and the ability of patients to be treated without consenting to having their data shared diminishes.

As the algorithms make things easier for most, they frustrate others. An undercurrent of creative individuals pushes against the pre-canned, anticipated answers aimed at making life easier for people and more profitable for advertisers. This “New Creative Class” develops high-touch, anti-technological, environmentally aware offers that seek to counterbalance the technological ubiquity and smoothing function that seems to be at work in society. 

In order to account for the rapid technological innovation and the constant shift in business models, the US government has essentially removed itself as a barrier to growth, streamlining regulations and reporting except those related to the most essential levels of human rights and safety. Economically, people are left on their own to invest what is necessary to find success.

Because of the ability to adapt to local needs more rapidly, and more efficiently, many US government functions have been outsourced or eliminated in favor of local programs. The success of learning profiles and personal education apps has eliminated the need for the Department of Education. This leaves the public sector’s role greatly diminished on a day-to-day basis, though it continues to invest in long-term projects it considers strategic, like environmental protection from climate change, species continuity, space exploration and human longevity.

That said, where government does still exist, in areas like national defense, global trade and agriculture, and international disease control and prevention, pragmatism rules as those who are highly trained have access and insights to more data than ever before, and they do use that data to make decisions rather than falling back on ideological biases.

Qualifications come from a number of sources, all of which are tied into a credentialing standard API that posts credentials directly to various online resumes and reputation systems. All of these systems have been hacked to both takeaway credentials and to post false ones.

Validity of both skills and information is a function of its market share; core research functions not oriented toward the marketplace are largely obsolete—still churning out insight to declining and increasingly disinterested sponsors. 

The consumer is fickle, and what is in vogue finds itself easily discarded with the next “trend.” This goes as much for governance models as it does for consumer goods. Liberal democracy finds itself in defensive mode among a sea of local models that all seem to sort of work, from beneficent autocracies to social network-enabled virtual communes.

A multitude of channels exist to connect people through the Internet. Although large players like Facebook exist, even platforms have become increasingly fragmented along interest and community lines. Machine learning bridges gaps and helps keep people aware of what they need to be aware of.

The US remains a fragile economic leader as its investments in the 10s and 20s lead to energy independence. Much of the technology connecting the world and managing transactions remains US-centric, and English has taken on an even more global character following years of tumultuous economic setbacks in Europe. China is challenging the US economically, however, but is struggling with the necessity to break through the English barrier with its software. While China’s domestic markets are becoming sophisticated, the lack of Chinese language skills outside of China and its immediate environs means that it is not reaping benefits from the increasingly micro-transaction level payments that characterize e-commerce in 2030. India, on the other hand, has completely adopted a multi-lingual business stance and is gaining in its ability to compete with US firms for business contracts and consumer mindshare.

To Each Their Own

Quad B (Closed sources of learning with rapid change)

Technological and social changes are managed by gatekeepers: governments, schools, along with large public and private institutions.

When Saanvi received her invitation to Georgia Tech, she could hardly believe it. Saanvi already considered herself an engineer, having won a major state robotics competition at 14, but she wasn’t completely sure she wanted to accept. Universities these days contract with bright students to not only educate them but to help develop and commercialize their ideas. This wasn’t just an invitation to get a degree, it was an invitation to partner with the school for much longer than four years—four years, that is if Saanvi created something innovative enough to keep her around longer. On the flip side, if she doesn’t take Tech up on its offer, Saavi would receive, at best, a second-rate education, and that will mean starting adult life with debt rather than royalties.

In the end, the decision isn’t all that hard.

Higher education now competes directly with the business, using its size, scope and position to block out external partners from trespassing on its patents, proprietary practices, and intellectual property.  Protecting the investment in research and development does not imply a slow transfer of technology but rather a new competitive model where higher educational institutions share less among one another as they seek to convert their intellectual property into economic value. Educators and researchers, who are now seen as intrapreneurs, take models of academic-economic cooperation to new heights.

The pace of change is fierce. Organizations that can’t keep up, including many universities and colleges, get subsumed into larger structures. Embrace change or be eaten is a common mantra. 

But larger isn’t always better. The rapid merger and acquisition activity has led to increasingly dysfunctional management practices that often fail to find the right balance in the chaotic environment. Multiple cultures and multiple infrastructures slam into each other at light speed, but management has little time to weave a new, cohesive culture before finding themselves on the receiving end of more transferred employees and disgruntled managers if they are themselves targeted to be the disgruntled ones.

On the technical side, this has led to organizations that apply technology to compartmentalize practice. Forced adoption has killed Bring-Your-Own-Device and Bring-Your-Own-App.  Most information, including technical information, continues to flow unrestrained least, leaders miss a serendipitous opportunity to transform discovery into profit, but there is so much of it flowing that making sense of it is a challenge. 

Student Attributes	Student Behaviors
Versatile Good mentors Self-Reliant/Able to fend for themselves Search proficiency Dedicated Adaptive learners Prepared Nimble Business savvy Results driven Self-directed Resilient Technology is my friend Highly stressed Innovative Compulsive Fierce academic competitor Gets up to speed quickly Strongly associated with their institution Highly competitive spirit and drive Smart Focused	Able to market themselves Learns how to accumulate credentials in a variety of ways Forming a relationship with mentor/guide early Act as their own learning entrepreneur and aware of the realities of this model Keeping up with pace of change without losing focus of what really matters, including what learning is important

A strong West Coast/East Coast bias has driven a wedge into the American education landscape. It isn’t that schools don’t recruit nationally, but that once someone makes a commitment, they are part of a system, and as that system continues to refine itself, natural synergies in geography have created very different paths, with the West Coast capitalizing on its software and computer hardware design credentials while the East profits from innovations in agriculture, micro-manufacturing, healthcare, and banking. They need each other, but the competitive battles have gone far beyond sports and resulted in some changes to sports, including the cessation of Inter-league football except for the all-important championship games, which are used as propaganda to express the technical prowess of the various programs. Many restrictions about the naturalness of sports have been dropped so schools are free to effectively augment their athletes with physical, mental and biological enhancements.

For educators, affiliation is strong, and so is funding, as long as they find projects that appeal to the intrapreneuring teams or create quick hits that generate their own funding. Those professors who become self-sustaining can do just about anything they like as long as they keep producing. The last thing an inventor wants to do is be relegated to teaching people someone else’s ideas. Teams do find footholds, and profit sharing is common for big projects. Everybody, though, makes sure everybody knows what he or she contributed. 

When it comes to teaching, nothing is sacred because if it isn’t relevant, then it doesn’t count, and that means anything old that hasn’t found a way to prove relevance has been swept away. Syllabi are simple and updated often. The approval comes from registration and results. You can teach anything once. If no one shows up, the class is canceled. If students don’t like the outcome, then the class is changed, taken off the schedule or handed over to another instructor. Courses have become a kind of business often associated with more of a profit-sharing model than a salary. Liberal arts don’t suffer as much as feared because they combine with engineering to facilitate innovation, but the study of liberal arts is more focused on results than reflowing and exploratory. Technical schools thrive as demand for skilled workers skyrockets in light of increasingly “in-sourced” manufacturing and infrastructure jobs.

Credentials and affiliations are the essential passports to opportunity. The economic gap between those with credentials and those without widens.  Not all credentials are created equal—the value of the degree or diploma depends upon the institution that issued it in the context of the institution that is evaluating it.  

Institutions with access to technological innovation take the opportunity their prestige affords them to “colonize” less enriched institutions, establishing “branches” that trade on the reputation of their larger entity and provide both cash and a steady flow of new talent into the more selective home academy.

Although most students are young, that isn’t universally so. Because it is so easy to profile people through their online activity, educational institutions seek out “misplaced” workers who would add value to their models. The same is true of business, but business is at a distinct disadvantage because it doesn’t have ready access to the years of accumulated learning records available once a learner provides access permission.

Governments have become more conservative, but only after accepting the inevitability of what for some is seen as a major shift in education. Although as schools start to act more like businesses, conservatives rally to defend their rights, even ensuring that educational institutions, including state schools, gain equal footing with business when it comes to rights in such areas as campaign finance—the shift to this model was radical and highly disruptive. Once the influence of financing became clear, the entire proposition became bi-partisan. With the fragile state of the global economy, no one could really afford to get too far down the us/them path on an internal matter. There are bigger fish to fry than education.

The US has pulled much of its manufacturing back home as the micro-manufacturing boom offers scale through distribution. The high-end services sector aligns itself to this new opportunity and drives revenue by coaching through reinvention. They now sell themselves internationally as the reinvigorated United States once again attempts to assert itself as a model to emulate in other countries. This time, though, alternative, more open models in Europe and India and more closed models in China and Africa compete while global business leaders assess which approach is really working (or not).

Consistent standards for technology, information, data (which is in many ways the currency of the day) and intellectual property laws prove harder to enforce as each large entity moves further down the path of its own proprietary approach. If you aren’t working together, then your stuff doesn’t have to work together either. This includes social media migrating to primarily encompassing enterprise level relationships. These new hybrid communications systems, which offer voice, video and messaging, largely replace e-mail, which has become more of a notification mechanism. Personal social networks still stretch across the globe but their political influence has become greatly diminished, though they still play a role in e-commerce and retail for transaction initiation and profile building.

Walled City

Quad C (Closed sources of learning with managed or slow change)

Institutions and governments hold tight to the levers of change and creative power—they exert control over a wide range of social and economic endeavors.

Professor Chen stands before the class of freshman and apologizes for the lack of air conditioning. Online learners fill the screen with smiles. Things are on the mend, but it will take a while. He continues with his lecture on the history of computing. He begins with Babbage, spending most of the afternoon talking about Ada Lovelace.

On the mend. This is how much of the world feels. Governments across the globe are working diligently to tweak this, to manage that, to pull the right levers and make meaningful investments, but everything is just taking a while to get moving.  As organizations, public and private, attempt to get a running start at anything, something either gets in the way, or the path ends up meandering despite best efforts.

Slow change means a slower economy with fewer opportunities for the ambitious.  Tight restrictions and control on social, economic, and technological advances reinforce and extend social, cultural and political ossification. That said, the slow pace of change also means government promises get fulfilled before they get derailed or obsoleted by new technology. And because of this, all branches of government are enjoying historic approval numbers.

Multinationals have come full circle, hiring local workers to serve global enterprises. As margins shrink and energy remains inexpensive, incumbent organizations and many start-ups reconsider intangibles, re-examining their intellectual property and selling expertise in new ways.

Businesses are able to consolidate their gains and increase their competitive position over rivals through partnerships with universities to provide research and trained employees.  At the other end of the spectrum, as the pace of change slows, smaller entities—businesses, schools and groups of all stripes—are able to catch up and participate in a variety of activities.  

Social networking exists primarily to assist internal processes, maintain business relationships and facilitate the exchange of knowledge. 

Advertising has slowly eroded as the source of buoyancy for Internet services, with many businesses returning to fee-for-service or subscription models. 

Conservative values dominate the core of America, with the North East and West Coast as liberal holdouts, but earlier liberals wouldn’t recognize the current inhabitants of places like San Francisco or Portland as liberals. But then again, conservatism has changed significantly as well: legislating marijuana taxes, licensing family planning clinics and ensuring equal pay for equal work with competitive minimum wages, along with ensuring that many natural habitats remain natural.  A range of conservative “brands” exists. One group of conservatives, for instance, touts the value of all forms of “conservation,” leading to a movement that seeks to preserve nature and natural law.

Student Attributes

Student Behaviors

Unified beliefs Engaged Organized Flexible in which program of study they “choose”  Masters of current technology Listen and obey Good students CompliantHave the resources (money) to be educated Masters of “The System” Creative in context Willing to be generalists Informed of options at an early age Good decision-makers Submissive Lack of curiosity Information literacy

Develop and maintain personal plans & portfoliosAdvocate for themselves Can demonstrate knowledge and show results Self-directed identification of quality mentors Predict what knowledge they will need Creatively way to brand information and knowledge packets Share valuable and trusted informationInformation navigation Seek leadership development opportunities Identify the goal and path to knowledge while navigating a variety of sources in a variety of formats Evaluate the quality and authenticity of information

The general propensity to fragment into a multitude of political camps has led to legislative paralysis and increased power for the executive and judicial branches of government. Over the past decade Presidents have become reliant on executive order when legislation fails to materialize.

In many ways, the United States remains the economic and cultural leader in the world, but as the economy slows, distant influences become less important – it is the immediacy of the customer that shapes service offerings and brand promises. The veneer of global brands gives way to an appreciation for what can be created by local craftspeople and what knowledge is contextual and relevant within cultural and physical proximity.

The Academy is seen as the arbiter of knowledge and skills, and institutions guard this power closely.  Strategic alliances between institutions and private industries consolidate this power and encourage targeted innovation toward specific objectives. Being well-rounded is important.  Many students pursue multiple degrees, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes serially. Being well-credentialed from the right place for the future you want is important. Many long-time students learn how to teach as part of the academic experience.

Educational institutions have found that for many classes, applying the industrial method is working well. They create cookie-cutter classes with clear, measurable outcomes and franchise them out. The majority of corporate professional development is now delivered via on-premise college courses taught by former consultants who have returned to the academy.

The cost of education is high, but it has stabilized as the external sale of courses and the monetization of staff lead to new sources of income.

The government is letting this transformation take place without interfering. Legislators and executive leadership, including the President of the United States, are much more focused on the repatriation of jobs and ensuring that globalization mistakes of the past several decades aren’t repeated. Economies shrink, but they become more local and, therefore, more sustainable. Although smaller, the economy doesn’t chew up as much in long-distance hauls, global insurance and unstable exchange rates.

A less global world is also safer. The US has pulled out of the Middle East. The Americas remain interdependent but energy-independent from the rest of the world. Promising new small fusion reactors may create infinite energy soon, but this remains just a promise. Fracking continues to pay off, despite some ecological downsides. The Keystone pipeline was approved after Canada decided to only serve Mexico and South American countries and to help shore up US reserves when necessary. The price of gasoline remains near all-time lows.

Innovation and searching for the “next big thing” has given way to a comfortable sense of consistency and continuity.  Some large institutions even offer coaching programs for smaller organizations that further homogenize structures and practice. 

With the costs of adapting to rapid change no longer a constant business cost, institutions and individuals can make other strategic investments, some to bolster their status (either as gatekeepers for institutions or as individuals) and others to extend their mission or interests.  

Drowning in Riches

Quad D (Open sources of learning with managed or slow change)

Automation and analytics have failed—and people have arrived to replace them.

There was a time when people trusted computers for everything, and they started to automate all manner of human endeavors, from creating shopping lists to driving cars. The Great Attack stopped all of that. Over just a period of just a few weeks hackers raided many major financial institutions. Billions of dollars simply disappeared.  Inter-banking balance sheets wouldn’t reconcile, and that took down those not directly attacked. That wasn’t all. Hackers also stole credit cards and shut down cloud services, sometimes for weeks. Eventually, “the cloud” found a way to fight off the vandals, but not before its reputation was ruined and the content it retained was corrupted or incomplete. People still blog and post, but they don’t quite trust that what they want will be there when they want it. All “automation” is suspect because it may turn off at any time. People are reluctant to become dependent on technology again.

Resurgent offline storage suppliers provide comfort with high-capacity, encrypted, personal storage solutions. 

Amid all this turmoil, online universities and those with hybrid models also took a hit. Remote students couldn’t connect. Even in the most traditional schools, grades and records went missing. Only the most archaic of systems avoided attack.

Many of the big services, from Apple to Google also lost in the Great Attack as music, movies and search weren’t there when people wanted them. Consumers quickly realized that what they owned digitally really wasn’t theirs without a working infrastructure. Sharing of non-digital-rights-management music soars and bootleg copies of movies and television shows move from “personal backup” to peer-to-peer networking services once touted as business services.

Social networking has deteriorated with the removal of proactive suggestions, facial recognition and advertising. Most of the small services are gone, with everything entrenched with what is left of Google and Facebook.

Information, however, remains free, thanks to an explosion in open-source research and the dizzying array of websites, tutoring programs, videos, and tools touting the ability to teach everything from theoretical physics to flax spinning.  Many of these services authenticate humans and then allow them to browse freely, but they turn off access to bots. Search is restricted to local information silos. The use of gatekeepers to restrict automated access frustrates the accumulation and consolidation of information into mega-libraries.

Legislation about backups and redundancy is seen as “too little too late.” In Congressional hearings, testimony after testimony all amounts to: “We can’t really guarantee anything.”

The economic dip from the Great Attack pushed anti-regulation legislators from their seats and replaced them with regulatory activists. There is also a marked shift toward social and economic engineering to help drive economic recovery.

Public funding for education is on the wane, along with tax dollars being taken in by the federal, state and local governments. The generally stagnant economy makes obtaining funds from other sources difficult. Some companies, however, are sitting on piles of pre-Great Attack cash hordes and offer funding to institutions that can offer specific research assistance or a particular hedge.

Student Attributes

Student Behaviors

Flexible Mobile Organized Efficacy Resourceful Convincing Determine their own measures of quality in their credentials Independent learner Critical thinkers Good problem solvers Critical of learning supplier Frustrated and scared Move quickly from analysis to action Resilience from navigating multiple road blocks Cynical Good “testing” skills that demonstrate competence Can make sense of the huge amount of information

Can compete in a saturated world Doing well on standardized entrance exams Prepare early Early decision-making, early career aptitude exploration Stay on track; no room to explore AdaptationLearn adaptive skills and are self-directed.   Tech will have reached an apex Adapt to traditional approaches to learning, whatever their personal affinity Find “quality” programs Find alternative ways to fund their education by scholarship or other means due to high cost Choose the right institution Choose the “right” institution

Now, students can’t turn to any single source to complete their education.  Institutions remain stuck in a model that no longer meets the needs of their students or the workplace. They turn inward, reflecting on their lost stature, which further deteriorates their motivation for change.  This situation has frustrated innovation and experimentation in business as well.  People cobble together information mostly from online sources; some of it is proprietary, some open source in order to build models of the world for themselves and their organizations.  Data and information often can’t be verified for their authenticity or accuracy. 

Educators attempt to keep up with the world by constantly tweaking their courses to attract students and maintain interest. As portfolios and practical skills take hold over traditional learning, educators must constantly find ways to ensure that learners know why what they are learning will immediately benefit them.

People make decisions based on what they know, with heavy biases toward what they want the answer to be. Like the information environment, ideologies are rich and varied, and it is often left to the consumer of information to decide what the truth is, at least for them, and what bias or ideology drove the creation and distribution of the information.

This is a boom time for librarians and other information analysts, as the traditional idea of a “knowledge worker” rekindles in a 1950s definition. The big difference, however, is that the sources of information are much more vast. Specialties arise by domain and information type in this renaissance of the human intellect. There is also an underground of ill-qualified analysts with forged credentials (which are hard to verify) and a growing movement to provide biased information in order to influence the direction of those seeking information transformation and interpretation services.

But in this environment, learning institutions have lost control of the marketplace. They are but one source of information.  Where quality and validity is a major challenges, learning institutions are more trusted than most sources, but they can’t keep up with the amount of information. To the information consumer, not having an answer to something creates trust issues almost as much as providing a bad answer.

Businesses, too, suffer from information overload. Investments in human-based knowledge interpretation and transformation differentiate many companies from one another. Only those organizations that invest in these specialized skills can compete operationally, let alone drive new innovations. The pace of change has slowed significantly as the feedback loop of technology driving technology has come to a screeching halt.

As the government seeks to rebuild, there is renewed interest in centralized education policy, and many legislators tout proposals to kick-start the economy through education, recognizing that it may be a long while before trust in technology reforms. Not only is there a need for more knowledge translation, synthesis interpretation and transformation, but other, more practical and physical skills are also required. Large public works projects attach to aging infrastructure, for instance. Basic skills can be acquired at the job site, but learning how to teach those skills and the supervisory and management knowledge required to effectively manage large projects is often lacking. Consultants move into specific education niches, often creating lucrative businesses. 

Those who curate, manage, sort and repackage information find economic security.  Unfortunately, the role of cicerone for this galaxy of diffuse knowledge is filled by a multitude of groups, and organizations, institutions—businesses and governments pay premiums to capture and collect the information that they need just to remain functional.  Learners, left largely on their own to navigate the sea of information resources, cast wide nets. The most successful present themselves to employers as astute consumers of the vast wealth of information that is available—and prove their assertions by delivering on the job.  

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the University System of Georgia for funding this project. I also want to acknowledge the outstanding contributions of the following members of the University System of Georgia and its campuses for their contributions to the development and execution of the MOOCs and for their contributions to the scenarios that resulted from this work.

Myk Garn, PhD – Assistant Vice Chancellor for New Learning Models, University System of Georgia and co-instructor of the Invent and Explore the Beyond MOOCs.

Dr. Leeds is the Assistant Vice President of Technology Enhanced Learning and the Executive Director of the Distance Learning Center at Kennesaw State University

Nathan W. Moon is the Associate Director for Research of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Jonathan Watts Hull is Assistant Director of Policy and Partnership Development in the Office of Educational Access and Success at the Board of Regents University System of Georgia (USG). 

Dr. Keith D. Bailey is the Director of the Office of Online Learning at the University of Georgia.

Paul M.A. Baker, Ph.D., is Senior Director, Research and Strategic Innovation at Georgia Tech’s Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP)

Jonathan Boyd is a student in the joint doctoral program in public policy at Georgia State University and Georgia Institute of Technology.

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