In 2007 we contracted CIBIT to develop a scenario guide based on existing work across European business, adding an education and more specifically IT perspective to generic scenarios by running a series of pilot workshops and synthesising participants’ contributions.
The outputs from this pilot work have been further synthesised and are presented here to download and use. In addition, we ran an event to provide a final detailed layer in narrative/story format which further detailed thoughts on the wider learning landscape (as opposed to just considering higher education) and what services might look like in each of the four futures.
The various collated ‘scenario sets’ are available to download here, as are packs for each quadrant (covering all levels) (packs comprise zip files containing PDF format documents).
You can take whichever level of detail you want as a starting point, depending on the scope and scale of the problem you’re looking to address. We recommend you use the ‘Level 0′ set as a basic starting point for you to refine your own detail. If you want a ‘quick start’ then use Level 3 which already includes some sector-specific detail from previous iterations of the process – these are explained below.
The ‘Level 0‘ outputs are derived from the material collated by CIBIT from a range of European business, and these form the generic foundations of the other scenario sets – levels 1, 2 and 3 are further iterations or ‘fine-tuning’ of the foundation set. Level 1 synthesises thoughts from our pilot workshops on the characteristics of the higher education environment in each of the generic scenarios, and Level 2 further drills down to consider the nature of IT in each of these HE worlds.
Level 3: ‘The Tanfield Scenarios’ documents the output of the JISC infoNet event, which was held in June 2007 on the world’s oldest railway at Tanfield in County Durham.
You can download a pack of summary slides providing a high-level overview of each quadrant at each of the four levels.
By way of example as to the further use of these scenario ‘beds’, JISC infoNet subsequently used the Tanfield outputs as the basis for a workshop at the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, using the technique to consider the strategic implications of emerging technologies and pedagogic approaches for the library community.
However you use these materials, or even if creating your own scenarios from scratch, bear in mind these outputs are not forecasts but simply a sketch of a possible future, the intention being to get you to ‘think outside the box’ and consider the fit of your strategy into these future possibilities. As with any future-gazing, factors in the present can radically change future possibilities – so make sure you keep reappraised of your trend analysis to verify the plausibility of your scenarios.
Scenario quadrants
Each iteration of our scenario sets provide a layer of more detail based on an underlying framework. Choosing the axes on which you wish to operate is discussed in more detail in the step-by-step guide.
In each of our scenario levels, the axes used to consider the various extremes are from Individualisation to Social Integration along the horizontal axis, and from Globalisation down to Regionalisation on the vertical axis.
As well as the facility to download the narrative for each set, we have also bundled the resources together by each of these ‘quadrants’, to facilitate your scenario project should you want to concentrate on a particular quadrant, or for large-scale projects to provide the facility to access the full layers of detail for each of the quadrants.
You can also download a pack of summary slides providing a high-level overview of each quadrant at each of the four levels.
The Scenario Sets
Level 0 | Four Futures For Europe
Generic scenarios compiled from a 2004 European scenario study
Level 1 | HE Scenario Skeleton
Synthesis from the JISC pilot workshops
Level 2 | IT in the HE Scenarios
Further exploration of the role and nature of IT in the HE scenarios
Level 3 | The Tanfield Scenarios
Narrative outputs encompassing the wider role of learning providers and the nature of lifelong learning