Digital education futures: design for doing education differently

The future is both an elusive, and allusive, concept. Who can predict the future, especially in today's complex and uncertain world?

The last two years have illustrated this profoundly. And what of our digital education future – what will that look like, and how can we shape it?

What can we learn from where we have progressed to now in terms of collaborative and participatory, design-based research, innovation and technology, at this important moment in our educational history?

We are pleased to announce the publication of this first special issue of the Irish Educational Studies on the topic of digital education futures, which helps to answer these important questions, looking at technology-enhanced learning in education as we learn and teach through and beyond COVID-19.

This special issue publishes a diverse selection of papers that can help us to envision the future of education and how we can design for doing education differently, post-pandemic.

The papers range from virtual reality and design-based research to blended learning, MOOCs and humanoid robots, offering us creative, principled and participatory insights and perspectives on how innovative technologies can be deployed to enhance learning and teaching.

But, first, back to the future.

The future will likely always remain out-of-reach, an elusive notion. The philosopher Alan Watts contends that ‘the future is a concept – it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now/We find there is only present, only an eternal now’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021).

The notion that the future does not exist would seem to create a paradox, and thus set us up for failure, including in a special issue of a research journal looking at digital education futures.

However, even if it is ‘impossible to predict the future’, ‘designing something changes the future that is possible’ (Stanford Life Design Lab 2021).

Although elusive/amorphous, the future represents a powerful orientation for us, in our thinking, in that it can provide a context to suggest positive changes, growth and advancements that are to come. As well as eludes, the future alludes – to an improved, more inclusive education for all.

This better future is what we continually strive for in our teaching, educational policy, leadership and educational research. As education is fundamentally a development-oriented profession and discipline, it can be said the future is one of education's most important ideas. Teachers are centrally concerned with pupils and learners continually developing their potential, and providing them with the skills to realise those talents over the course of a lifetime. Therefore, how do we design systematically for better educational futures for all?

When we reflect upon, and research the future as an idea in education, there are inherent issues that we first need to explicate. The concept of educational future can get taken over as though there is a particular kind of future that is inevitable, one we must necessarily strive towards. This can be characterised and shaped by certain discourses and narratives, especially those predicated on market or industrial imperatives.

However, as outlined by Bayne and Gallagher (2021), the way forward should be inclusive and participatory, where learners and teachers are at the heart of the process. And this is where design-based research can prove especially helpful to us, in envisioning and designing shared educational futures that are truly collaborative and dialogic, and which potentially enable all learners and teachers to flourish.

Consequently, due to the possibilities afforded by futures research in educational design, the intersection of educational futures and co-design has become a key developmental and research trajectory in education and educational research, for example: the Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI) at the University of Cambridge: https://www.deficambridge.org/; and the University of Edinburgh's Futures Institute.

Futures methodologies are used in designing teacher education, including the deployment of innovative mobile technologies in the professional development of teachers (Schuck et al. 2018; Burden and Naylor 2020); and innovative educational programmes are being conceptualised and introduced internationally, for example, Designing Futures at the National University of Ireland, Galway (Hall 2021).

In late 2021, as we then looked hopefully to a future, post-pandemic, Irish Educational Studies issued a call for papers for this special issue on ‘Digital Education Futures: design for doing education differently.’

It constituted an invitation to the Irish and international research community to explore and consider what digital futures might look like, how embracing digital technologies in new ways can enhance what is learned and how learning happens, as well as who is involved in learning encounters – online, blended and hybrid.

The pandemic has thrown into stark relief the challenges now faced by education globally, as reported in research literature all around the world, including the special issue of this journal in June 2021 (Hall et al. 2021).

When we reflect on the emergence and impact of COVID-19 in 2020 and the contemporary educational literature, it was difficult to locate research pointing to the likelihood of a global pandemic, which would upturn educational systems all around the world. Indeed, one was probably more likely to encounter retrospective analyses of the historical impact of pandemics on education and schooling in the medical and epidemiological literature. Beyond a few prescient references, it was hard to find – in the general educational research literature at the time – articles dealing specifically with a global pandemic and any impact this would have on education.

With over 1.5 billion learners affected and disrupted in their learning in the last two years, and the pivot to new modes of blended, hybrid and online learning, the time seems ripe – more now than ever before – to critically and creatively conceptualise the potential and role of digital technology in education.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a unique opportunity for both students and educators to reflect on the future of education (Darling-Hammond and Hyler 2020; World Economic Forum 2020). Many educators and students have realised that it is possible, and sometimes desirable, to do things differently which opens the door to new alternatives, and provides the potential to radically reform education.

During the pandemic digital technologies afforded educators opportunities to develop educational environments that were inclusive, meeting a variety of learning needs, personal circumstances and professional and societal demands. However reliance on technology highlighted that not all students have equal access to infrastructure, nor the skills/literacies required to navigate digital spaces optimally (Beaunoyer, Dupéré, and Guitton 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has also served as a lever for change in education. For example, the pivot to large-scale online learning has made possible new forms of innovative, hybrid and blended learning, which would have been considered unimaginable or infeasible prior to the pandemic.

To date, it can be argued that the education sector has been an adopter of, rather than an innovator in the area of digital technologies, and that the sector has been predominantly technology-led. Key to our digital future is the urgent need for participatory design with and for teachers and schools, where they lead innovation in the field of digital education. What we require is what McKenney (2013, 2) calls Zones of Proximal Implementation: ‘incremental innovation targeted at what teachers and schools can implement with realistically sustainable amounts of guidance or collaboration’.

This necessitates critical inquiry, debate and discussion between educators, students, communities and technology companies (Laurillard 2013; Morris and Stommel 2018).

This special issue affords us an opportunity to debate and discuss what the digital education future may look like, and how we can design effectively for innovative forms of technology-mediated learning. Furthermore, what are the digital opportunities that we can take advantage of now, to envision and design digital education futures that are inclusive for as many learners as possible? Who is potentially being excluded in our digital futures, and therefore how can we ensure technology is design and deployed for a better educational future for all? Consequently, what is the role of pedagogy, technology, policy makers, educators and students in shaping learning spaces, experiences and models, post-pandemic?

This special issue of Irish Educational Studies welcomed papers that addressed, critiqued and outlined how we can design effectively for digital education futures that help to mediate innovative and inclusive learning, teaching and assessment for all.

The special issue collects a range of articles, drawn from across all aspects of education, in Ireland and internationally, exploring how we can design digital education futures that are engaging and empowering for learners and teachers.

We are delighted to bring to publication this first special Issue of IES that helps us to map the future of digital education in Ireland and internationally. This is especially timely considering the increased importance of digital technology for learning, teaching and assessment now, and the challenges and opportunities this entails.

As we move hopefully towards a future beyond the immediate pandemic, the articles and research published in this issue will guide us, not only in how we can resume education-as-usual, but very much in terms of design for doing education differently, in ways that are potentially more dialogic, inclusive and participatory for all learners and teachers.