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Starting my future of higher education seminar at Georgetown

Bryan Alexander
5 min readAug 24, 2023

Today I’m holding the first class for my Georgetown University Learning, Design, and Technology future of higher education class. It’s one I created from scratch and am enormously fond of.

I’ve taught it several times, and am keeping the majority of the syllabus this time. Yet I’m also adding some twists and would like to share the whole thing here, in my usual spirit of transparency and openness around teaching.

The goal remains to teach students three things: the best thinking about the future of higher education; how to do futures work; interdisciplinary study. We do this work through a bunch of tasks and exercises: reading articles, stories, and books; minilectures from me; discussions driven by them; weekly responses; weekly horizon scanning; two mid-term projects. As ever, the final project involves them creating a new higher education institution and portraying it creatively.

Also as ever, this is a student driven class to a substantial degree. The class shapes “rules of the road” on the first day. They determine one week’s topic and readings for two weeks. Their horizon scanning findings feed into discussions (and this time we record them on a running Google Doc).

One change is that I’m adding AI material throughout the term. It’s a mix of hands-on and critical work. They will do AI exercises and hold discussions about them nearly every week, tied to that week’s topics.

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Bryan Alexander
Bryan Alexander

Written by Bryan Alexander

Futurist, speaker, writer, educator. Author of the FTTE report, UNIVERSITIES ON FIRE, and ACADEMIA NEXT. Creator of The Future Trends Forum.

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