Teaching Foresight and Futures Literacy and Its Integration into University Curriculum

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Abstract

Despite the accelerated dynamics of the environment, higher education institutions slowly update their curricula in entrepreneurship education according to global challenges and market needs. Moreover, knowledge and good practice exchanges between educators of futures studies, business representatives, and academics is limited. This article aims to present a methodology for prototyping an online course for individuals to become more future-oriented in their professional and personal settings. The main research problems tackled by the authors relate to: 1) the identification of competences that would help academics, entrepreneurs, and students to deal with uncertainty and to 2) convey the competences to the target groups through learning topics selected from futures studies and the entrepreneurship repertoire. The authors of the article undertook and coordinated theoretical and empirical research on foresight and Futures Literacy and its correspondence with entrepreneurship within the beFORE project funded under the Erasmus+ program’s Knowledge Alliance scheme. The research process resulted in the identification of 12 key competence items and the development of a free, approximately 34-hour-long online course consisting of seven self-standing modules, 25 lessons, and 79 learning topics corresponding to these competences. The originality of the paper is in its contribution to the discussion on the competences and online course content that efficiently increase the capacities of using the future(s) in professional, academic, and personal settings.

About the authors

Anna Kononiuk

Bialystok University of Technology

Author for correspondence.
Email: a.kononiuk@pb.edu.pl
45A, Wiejska Street, 15-351 Bialystok, Poland

Anna Sacio-Szymanska

Lukasiewicz Research Network — Institute for Sustainable Technologies

Email: anna@4cf.pl
K. Pulaskiego 6/10, 26-600 Radom, Poland; 4CF Strategic Foresight, 4CF Strategic Foresight, Plac Trzech Krzyzy 10/14, 00-499 Warszawa, Poland

Stefanie Ollenburg

Freie Universitaet Berlin

Email: s.ollenburg@fu-berlin.de
Fabeckstr. 37, 14195 Berlin, Germany

Leonello Trivelli

University of Pisa

Email: leo.trivelli@gmail.com
Largo L. Lazzarino 56122, Pisa, Italy

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