Liberal arts campuses in 2015: five visions

What could a liberal arts campus look like in 2015?  How will changes in cyberculture shape small college and university strategy? I explored this question through several scenarios at a recent Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) conference, hosted by Dickinson College.

I keynoted the conference with a talk entitled “Five Ways of Looking at the Liberal Arts Campus in 2015.”  Those five big-picture futures each represented a different possible 2015.  I generated each scenario by selecting a powerful trend from our time, then extrapolating it into a world-influencing force five years from now.

• Digital Balkanization.  Silos are the norm, as an increasing amount of content and software  are located in separate platforms.  Academic life reflects this in many ways, directly and otherwise. (opposite of Open World, below)
• The Long Great Recession.  The American economy remains flat, never recovering fully from the crash of 2008.  Campus budgets have flattened in response, and academic life has changed in other ways.
• The Open World. Open content, open access, and open source are the norm.  (opposite of Digital Balkanization, above)
• A World of Points.  Gaming is the world’s leading culture industry.  At the same time, our normative behaviors and interactions are shaped by gaming practices and role-playing.  Academia has started changing in response.
• Imbrication Nation.  In a world where networked mobile devices are the norm, augmented reality is now mainstream.

I used the concept mapping ability of Prezi to lay out the ramifications of each of these five possible worlds as they unfold in multiple contexts and applications, including hardware and software ecosystems, formats and standards, cloud and data storage, social media, collaboration tools, videoconferencing, government policy, copyright, ebooks, the Semantic Web, and gaming.  At CLAC, I considered these scenarios specifically as they impact different parts of the liberal arts campus environment:

• computer hardware
• the library
• scholarly communication
• course management systems (CMSes)
• ebooks
• collaboration tools
• administrative computing
• data crunching
• professional development

I invite you to participate in this kind of futures thinking. Start by examining the full presentation and think through these scenarios yourself.  Which one of them seems most compelling to you?  How could you use the full set of five for planning at your institution?

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Have you ever done a scenario exercise?  How do you plan for possible futures at your institution?  That is, how do you identify and observe such trends, think of responses, work through organizational structures, and reflect on the process?

Caveat: these scenarios are exercises to think with. not flashes of a crystal ball.  I didn’t value their relative likelihood, nor endorse any one outcome.

Previous NITLE research on futures:

• “Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality” Educause Review, 2009.
• Prediction market Web game.
• NITLE blog posts, 2003-2009.