Students as the Creators of Future Learning

Curriculum ManagementAICurriculum Design
Written By Richard Knapp
Students as the Creators of Future Learning

Rethinking University Programmes

The impact of emerging technologies, automation and AI on the future job market is apparent to everyone involved in Higher Education.

Courses are being designed to enhance the human characteristics that technology cannot (yet) replicate, such as critical thinking, team working, empathy, and creativity.[i]

New programmes seek to foster human skills in a subject of study or through cross-discipline working. Students are encouraged to adopt diverse approaches, with course frameworks to evidence future employability skills.[ii]

Nevertheless, students are still positioned as the consumers of courses that are created for them. This is the case even when redesign processes involve students or where feedback has informed programme change.

The power dynamic in course creation resides with the academics who are steeped in an educational culture of knowledge exchange within institutions where predetermined frameworks of assessment limit the boundaries of creative design. When new modules include critical thinking, team working, empathy and creativity, these are usually constructed for - not by – the students who study them.

Courses enact a fundamental contradiction when they seek to foster creative thinking whilst positioning students in this way.

This is equally true for the online course revolution, which has accelerated after the covid pandemic. Academic programmes continue to be exercises in knowledge and skills acquisition, using conventional testing methods to evaluate how well a student can regurgitate their learning.

Greek gods teaching the origins of western theatre to undergraduates

When I used to teach the origins of western theatre to undergraduates, we would start by looking at the pagan mythology of the period.

One example was the story of the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, her daughter Persephone and Hades, the brother of Zeus.

Hades stole Persephone and took her to the underworld as his wife. Demeter mourned the loss of her daughter and the crops died.

The humans appealed to Zeus to save the earth, so Zeus ordered Persephone’s return to Demeter if she had not eaten any of the food of the dead. Hades tricked Persephone into eating a few pomegranate seeds so it was agreed that that she would spend part of each year with Hades and then return to Demeter. Autumn and winter occurred when Persephone left her mother followed by spring and summer when she returned.

This story was a simple way for the community to understand the existence of seasons. In this respect the knowledge belonged to everyone, whether or not they believed it to be a true explanation of the seasons. The myths were shared stories that could be changed through retelling by each generation.

Today our knowledge of the seasons is held by the expert gatekeepers of science, climate change and meteorology. Whilst this understanding is more accurate than ancient mythology, it belongs to these individuals rather than to the community. This relationship works when the expert is trusted. But in our current society such faith has been badly eroded with the resulting populist denial of climate change.

Detaching the ownership of knowledge from the community has helped to enable the questioning of the facts, including by those who have the power to bring about global changes.

When human existence is under threat from environmental, technological, biological, and political challenges, Universities should be far more radical and innovative in the approach to learning for future generations

AI computers redefining the future of university curriculum

Rather than tinkering around the edges of our curriculum in an attempt to infuse creative thinking and enhanced employability skills in University programmes, we should be much bolder in empowering students to take ownership of the learning experience for themselves so they can adapt to whatever comes in the future.

As with any change, it is hard for those of us who are steeped in an educational culture that has hardly changed for two hundred years to see how things could be radically different.

We should begin by asking our students to reimagine what learning could look like in the future

An interesting paradox in taking this approach is that emergent technologies help to achieve new possibilities for change by giving students the tools to create original curriculum and assessment methods for themselves.

This represents a substantial move away from the conventional hierarchies embedded in our educational culture.

But if Universities adapt quickly they could forge a new learning relationship with students and create an educational experience that we are yet to imagine.

Richard Knapp
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