
MSc in Education Futures
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
DURATION
1 up to 3 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time, Part time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
29 May 2025
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
Request tuition fees
STUDY FORMAT
Distance Learning, On-Campus
Key Summary
Introduction
A new, interdisciplinary degree with the Edinburgh Futures Institute
Education, in all its forms, is essential to a thriving society. How organisations, systems and people learn and change profoundly affects our lives, our surroundings and our futures. This MSc is a bold new programme for those who wish to engage critically with educational possibilities for the future, and understand how educational knowledge, organisations, spaces and relationships can positively shape societies.
The EFI Education Futures programme is designed to respond to the need for creative, critical and experimental thinking across education in schools, universities and colleges, and learning within communities, industries and organisations. Some of the issues you will explore include mobility, politics, environmental change, culture, social justice and how data-driven systems for managing and understanding the world influence learning and education.
You will explore the ways that knowledge, culture and skills are produced and reproduced, how people, organisations and systems learn, and how this influences global challenges and change. Your studies on this programme will support you to:
- think ambitiously about the future of education across all sectors
- gain vital data and creative skills to support your future career
- apply innovative methods to building a strong future for education and learning
Postgraduate Study at the Edinburgh Futures Institute
This programme is part of an interconnected portfolio of postgraduate study in the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI). EFI supports interdisciplinary teaching, learning and research that is focussed on complex global and social challenges.
Our programmes are all taught by academic experts from many different subject areas. As an EFI student, you will develop creative, critical and data-informed thinking that cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries. You will have the space to think deeply about questions linked to your own passions and professional goals, and will develop a project based on an issue that you care about.
As well as knowledge specific to your area of study, studying at EFI will give you the skills and understanding you need to become a creative, confident and critical citizen in a fast-changing world. These will include:
- core data skills
- data ethics
- the ability to interrogate issues of global scope
- the creative and analytic approaches to knowledge that are vital for building better futures
You can join us regardless of whether you already have skills in the use and application of digital data.
Admissions
Curriculum
Students on the programme study the following:
- A portfolio of EFI ‘shared core’ courses (40 credits) which teach the essential critical and hands-on data skills, enquiry methods, ethical and creative capacities needed to underpin your programme-based studies.
- Core courses (20 credits) specific to your programme.
- A project (taking the form of a 20-credit ‘integration and project planning’ course, and a 40-credit final project).
- A wide choice of short 10 credit optional courses (60 credits), at least two of which must be on topics related to your programme, with scope to study across the entire EFI portfolio.
Core courses
You will take the two 10 credit core courses for your programme:
- Future of Learning Organisations: Taking a holistic rather than sectoral view of the current educational landscape, this course critically engages with the trends and values, opportunities and constraints, that may shape individual and collective experiences of learning in the future.
- Educating for a Challenging Future: Educating for the future requires rethinking the concept of educational ‘solutions’ to complex, ‘wicked’ problems. This course synthesises educational and social theory, along with current research on pedagogy, to facilitate a structured, collaborative, interdisciplinary and innovative educational approach to challenging problems.
You will also take the following 10 credit shared core courses, which are compulsory for EFI students on all programmes:
- Interdisciplinary Futures
- Insights Through Data or Text Remix (choose one)
- Ethical Data Futures
- Representing Data or Building Near Futures (choose one)
These shared core courses place you in cross-disciplinary teams with students from other programme areas. They will teach you to collect, manage and analyse computational datasets, and to use emerging methodologies for mapping and designing the future. They will also teach the fundamentals of data ethics, while supporting you to use your creative skills in the analysis and representation of data-informed and qualitative inquiry.
Optional courses
EFI will offer a wide portfolio of about 40-50 optional courses taught by academic staff from across many discipline areas including approximately six to eight courses on topics associated with your programme. The exact courses will vary from year to year – in 2022-23 the courses associated with your programme may include:
- Culture, Heritage and Learning Futures
- Education, Personalisation and Surveillance
- Education, Data and Change
- Educational Technologies and Entrepreneurship
- Learning and Resilience
- Postdigital Society
- Relationality, Creative Practice and Education
- Work Futures
Optional courses from across the wider portfolio will cover a wide range of themes and topics, such as:
- Critical perspectives on how new technologies are changing society
- Data, programming and research skills that advance the skills taught in the EFI shared core
- The causes and consequences of inequalities around the world
- How new and rapidly changing technologies and data sources are transforming the future of democracy
- How narratives drive the way we understand the world
- Bringing service design and service management together to build change in a data-driven society
- Current challenges and futures for the creative industries
The project
In your final project, you will be able to apply your learning in depth to a domain, issue or concern which drives you. It could be:
- based on your own personal or professional interests
- defined by your employer
- sponsored by one of our EFI industry, government or community partners
- aligned to one of the EFI research programmes
You can submit your final project report as a written piece of work, or combine text with other forms as appropriate – video, visualisation, a digital artefact, performance, code.
You will provisionally identify your project topic relatively early on in the programme, and work on it in parallel with the taught courses. We expect projects to take an interdisciplinary approach which connects with the creative, data and future-oriented nature of the EFI core.
Part-time and full-time options
Full-time students on the programme take these courses in one year. Part-time students take the same courses as full-time students, over either two or three years:
- For the two-year version, students take 80 credits of courses in year one and 100 credits (including the project) in year two.
- For the three-year versions, students take 120 credits of courses over years one and two (with up to 80 credits per year in each year), and then take the project (60 credits) in year three.
Students can also study towards a Postgraduate Certificate or Postgraduate Diploma:
- Students have two years to undertake the Postgraduate Diploma, taking the same taught courses as students on the MSc, but not the project. They will take a total of 120 credits of courses - between 40 and 80 in each year.
- Students have one year to undertake the Postgraduate Certificate, taking 60 credits of courses, including between 10 and 40 credits of the EFI ‘shared core’ courses, between 20 and 50 credits of programme-specific courses (either the programme core courses or optional courses), and up to 30 credits from the broader suite of EFI optional courses.
Program Outcome
On successful completion of this programme, you will be able to:
- Understand and critically examine possible futures for formal and informal education.
- Analyse education’s role in shaping and responding to global challenges and social, political, cultural and environmental change, as well as how global processes are shaping education.
- Make critical links between education and data-driven innovation, exploring the geographies, mobilities, values, ethics and forms of measurement that come along with innovation, resistance to and reliance on data.
- Develop your ability to use computational dataset, critical inquiry, futures methodologies and interdisciplinary team working to address societal challenges relating to education futures.
- Apply your learning to a live project defined by you, your employer, or an EFI industry, government or community partner.
Career Opportunities
The programme is aimed at both professionals and recent graduates who work in, or are seeking to build a career in, either formal or informal learning and training sectors. Future opportunities may include education-related roles in:
- higher education
- further education
- community and cultural settings
- schools
- training organisations
- private, government and voluntary sectors
Whether your role or interest is in policy, learning design, teaching and delivery, or educational research, you will find courses and modes of study that will help you develop your career, and position you for roles in a range of education and learning organisations in a range of sectors.
The programme will be of particular interest to those who are preparing for or beginning leadership roles where a focus on developing future educational provision, policy, technologies and practices is key.
The core elements of the programme address the data and higher-order skills we know are important for the future of work, confident and critical citizenship, and a thriving, just society.