2016 scenario guide to effective tertiary education in New Zealand

This web-resource provides an interactive system-wide view of what tertiary education might look like in New Zealand in 2016. Tertiary education managers and leaders can use these scenarios to plan future organisational and programme development.

The scenarios

Four scenarios for the future provision of tertiary education were developed through a process of interviewing leaders in tertiary education, using the JISC scenario building strategies, and input from the broader tertiary education sector. Use the web-resource to explore each scenario. From the most conservative to the most radical. The scenarios are:

1. Articulation of courses within and across programmes is depicted by the dotted lines between the geometric shapes. The dots indicate relatively little flow into or out of tertiary education.
2. The ‘supermarket’ which provides an extensive range of learning objects, courses and other resources is depicted by the ‘shelved’ rows of boxes.
3. Quality branded consortia tend to collaborate across defined initiatives regulated by a Memorandum of Agreement between an institution and its partners, so these are depicted as larger geometric shapes that start to spread beyond the tertiary environment.
4. Self determination by learners for their own tertiary education is depicted by larger shapes a few of which escape the current boundaries of tertiary organisations to become more embedded within New Zealand society, as indicated by the koru and fern shapes. The dots are spread to indicate relatively high flow both into and out of tertiary education.

The horizontal axis is formed by the tension between facing ‘inward’ to academia/discipline and facing ‘outward’ to the employers, professions and iwi.

A vertical axis is formed by the tension arising between developing standardised learning experiences that take advantage of quality and production standards and enabling the flexibility of customising to students and their contexts.

The dotted lines around the geometric shapes indicate the ease of flow into and out of tertiary education.

The arrows at the centre of the axes indicate that courses and resources can be recycled between scenarios. For example, the resources in The 'supermarket' enable more 'Self determination' by learners when learning advisors guide them to relevant resources. In return, updating of resources and contributions by students in the other scenarios refresh and stock The supermarket’s ‘shelves’.

The report from this project is published under the Creative Commons 3.0 New Zealand Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike Licence (BY-NC-SA). Under this licence you are free to copy, distribute, display and perform the work as well as to remix, tweak, and build upon this work noncommercially, as long as you credit the author/s and license your new creations under the identical terms.