Technological Forecasting as a Tool for Curriculum Design

Abstract

One of the most important issues in education has to do with the updating process of curriculum. Many social and political reforms try to take steps in order to improve the educational system, but rarely do they tackle with one of the most important problems that education has nowadays: the increasingly fast obsolescence of the school curricula. This concern is especially vital in fields that are directly related with technologies, like in different university degrees in engineering and subjects like technology in secondary school. Our research group has been facing this problem for the las two years introducing a new technique in the subject "Educational innovation and research". The subject belongs to the MAES (University Master by the university of Seville for Secondary School Teachers) in the technology and industrial processes speciality. There is a quite wide bibliography about technological forecasting applied to different areas like marketing, product design, etc. However, is not easy to find cases of study where this technique is applied to educational curriculum designing directly, or, if so, these cases are not sufficiently documented and published. Nevertheless, fortunately there are some authors, such as Dimitry Kucharavy, that have carried out many studies and even in this case he has a specific subject about technology forecasting at the Politecnico di Milano 1]. Thus, we can extrapolate some procedures and theories to our students who are the people that have the important task of designing the curricula for the subject of technology in the Spanish secondary education for the near future. Technological forecasting techniques allow our students to face the curriculum designing tasks with an extraordinary and skilful orientation. Furthermore, they give them an additional motivation in their work. The aim of this paper is to describe the experience when introducing this technique in the last two academic years and discus the obtained results, as well as introducing the future prospects and the way forward in light of the speedy changes on technologies