Original challenge long-list

The five research challenges that have been chosen for Beyond Current Horizons were taken from a long-list of challenges, which were drawn up on the basis of:

  • the Futures Review
  • the vision for the programme
  • questions and concerns of the stakeholders and commissioners of the programme.

On commissioning the challenges, each was led by a ‘domain’ expert and an ‘education and technology’ expert. The purpose was to create connections, and explore the opportunities between the wider issues raised and the potential role of digital technologies in education to respond to these challenges.

A set of challenge papers were written by the experts, and are available to download in the findings section. Read the long-list challenge papers…

The long-list included challenges on:

  1. Childhood 2025 and beyond - In what possible ways might childhood change over the next 20-50 years?
  2. Knowledge in 2025 and beyond - How is knowledge produced, where, in what institutional settings, how it is regulated, how might disciplinary boundaries erode or change?
  3. Diverse populations - Focusing on questions of demographic change, in particular lowering fertility, migration, increased aging societies, increased mobility within and between nations, immigration patterns.
  4. Identities and communities - How might ‘identity’ and ‘community’ develop in relation to the development of networked, pervasive and personal technologies?
  5. New modalities, new democracies - Focusing specifically upon questions of modalities of communication offered by developments in information and communications technologies. 
  6. What does ‘work’ mean in 2025 and beyond? - How might ‘work’ change over the next 18+ years - both in terms of wider changes and more specifically, the role that digital technologies might play in informing such developments?
  7. Public/private education relationships in 2025 - Looking at ways in which public/private relationships may change over the next 18-40 years, particularly in relation to the potential role of the private sector and the market in education.
  8. Coping with complexity - Problems currently faced by individuals and societies are more complex than simple linear relations of cause and effect - how best might we enable individuals and groups to engage with complex questions and to think beyond linear cause and effect models of social and technological change?
  9. Socio-technical change - How might cutting-edge technological developments in computing, biosciences and mathematics interact with social structures and practices over the next 18-50 years, and how might subsequent changes in social practices have implications for education?
  10. Changing spaces, changing places? - Focusing specifically on attempting to explore how the use of space may be changing in 21st century society, looking at the ways in which existing institutions may be changing their functions, their relationships with their communities, and their relationships with each other.
  11. Post-crisis education - Looking at the effects of potential major disruptions to existing work, education and social patterns such as severe effects of climate change processes, lack of energy resources, pandemic, traffic gridlock, massive technology failure, economic failure, revolution.