Exploring the future of education in the AI era
AI has already changed education drastically in a short time. Many children happily use ChatGPT for their homework, and various apps offer ever more possibilities for personalised learning. AI can also support teachers with lesson (preparation) tasks, from planning to different ways of marking. AI can also change the market for education-materials providers: new entrants may shake up the sector. How, and how fast, this will happen, and exactly what change AI will bring to education, is still fairly uncertain. Regulating AI is now a significant theme, and more and more schools are banning "screens". Given these dynamics and uncertainties, Infinitas Learning (the parent company of Noordhoff, among others), one of Europe's largest education-materials providers, felt it was important to explore the future.
In a compact trajectory a small project team, supported by Jester Strategy, worked through several preparatory steps of a scenario project. From defining scope to identifying and analysing trends. In a one-day session, experts and strategists from various European subsidiaries of Infinitas came together to co-develop four possible future scenarios and think them through. How could such a scenario arise and what would it look like? What challenges would there be? What opportunities should we take? Who are the (new) competitors we need to differentiate from, and how will we do that?
The scenarios offered inspiration for options for action, and at the same time a testing framework for Infinitas Learning to see which of those options are "future-proof". As important as the outputs of a scenario trajectory is the shared process. The scenarios offered a structured way to have the conversation about the future and, above all, to make room for different perspectives on it. Together the scenarios form a shared language for looking at the future and talking about it. Precisely because scenarios are developed together, that shared "journey to the future" is as valuable as the outputs that end up in a report.
"Jester Strategy helped us think about the future in a structured way and challenged us to go further and more extreme than we had done so far. In the one-day session we mainly worked together to think the future through. In a structured way, but with plenty of room for discussion. Even though it was a compact engagement, the outcomes were rich."
– Moos Peeters, Senior AI Manager