The Older Academic in 2025

For this scenario imagine yourself as an academic in the year 2025

In 2025, you are 55 years old, which means you were born in 1970 and went through school without using a computer. You only began to be aware of computers in your undergraduate years and to use them in a small way in your PhD years. Since the 1990s, you have been using them increasingly for teaching and learning in Higher Education.

In 2020, you reached the age of 50. Since then you have not been tied to an academic institution, but working freelance as a thought leader, open communicator, online teacher and independent researcher. You compete with many other academics of a similar age who are doing the same thing. Full time positions in Universities are reserved for younger aspiring academics.

But you have 30 years teaching and research experience to draw on and are very tech savvy. You feel comfortable with ‘always-on’ learning, mobile learning, multimedia, social media, virtual worlds and computer gaming. You have your own web server, your own domain, you blog regularly, and you have a wide online network because you openly share many aspects of your life and work, although you are very astute in terms of online safety and security.

Being older yourself, you empathise well with the increasingly older learning population. You understand that they want a flexible course and curriculum, and a personalized learning environment. You consider yourself an academic mentor rather than a tutor.

Your teaching focuses on practical projects and problem solving and makes extensive use of multimedia, digital storytelling and social media for discussion and collaboration. You put a heavy emphasis on creativity and co-creation of knowledge.

For your research you collaborate in multi-disciplinary, international, online teams, and you share ongoing research on your blog and publish in open journals.

You expect to continue working in this way until you are at least 75 or older.

If you had been asked in 2015 whether you would be working like this in 10 years time, you would not have believed it, but now you can see that the academic career as you once knew it is dead.

Jenny Mackness 29-10-14