Digital Futures: The Student Experience in 2020, 2025 and 2030

In 2020

• The use of digital technologies are ubiquitous in lecture theatres, laboratories and classrooms. They connect students across different locations with each other, and with enhanced information and experiences. The library is in their pocket.
• The physical structure of learning spaces evolves with a shift from lecture-style "listen and learn" approaches, to greater collaboration and interactivity in class. Digital technologies support and enhance collaborations, extending them beyond the four walls of the classroom.
• Integrated systems, apps and platforms service information and communication needs more seamlessly. Students access information via a single source, regardless of whether the content is related to their learning, social or pastoral experience.
• Big data systems are used to provide constant performance data for individual students, including early warning signals to advise the need for intervention and additional support ahead of time.

In 2025

• While the student is affiliated with a specific university and may be present on their physical campus, learning experiences are delivered through a network of partners around the world through sophisticated digital learning platforms. Thus while the degree is awarded by the University of Nottingham, modules will have been taken with our global network of partners.
• A universal passport-style digital learning tracker logs student achievements and experiences from within the classroom and from informal learning activities, building a detailed profile used by employers to match prospects with future roles. Artificial intelligence advises the student of activities or modules to undertake in order to enhance their profile match with desired future employers.
• Students form global digital clusters and movements shaped around their values, beliefs and aspirations. Friendships and networks form beyond the boundaries of the traditional campus and the concept of virtual campuses becomes more formalised, with language and location no longer barriers to shared experiences.
• The student remains a student beyond formal graduation, continuing to "top up" and evolve their personal learning tracker over time with short courses and learning blocks added at the moment in time most meaningful to them.

In 2030

• The campus becomes a campus of one, as technologies such as digital learning trackers empower students to fully curate their own learning experience from a range of global sources.
• Artificial intelligence uses complex algorithms to guide the way that students curate their education programme. Systems take into account education achievement, learning styles, aspirations, social graph, values and beliefs, as well as health and wellbeing data to determine not just what they should study, but when and where they should study. Personality profiling matches the students with the most appropriate tutors for them, irrespective of location or language which are all overcome through digital technologies.
• Virtual reality, augmented reality and advances in robotics and machine learning empower advanced simulations, giving students lifelike experiences, especially in science and social science subjects from performing virtual surgical operations, to trading on the stock market.
• The line between study and employment is fundamentally blurred as education becomes increasingly on-demand, and truly life-long.