Learning at the Edinburgh Futures Institute

Our programmes offer a lot of flexibility in how you choose to study. You can study on a full-time basis over one year, or part-time over two or three years. You can register for a full MSc, or for a Postgraduate Diploma or Postgraduate Certificate. You can take these programmes either online or on-campus, or combine on-campus with online study (though please note that the MSc Creative Industries programme is full-time and on-campus only so it can benefit from the city’s strong cultural organisations).

We also offer students the opportunity to study individual courses on a lifelong learning basis without signing up to study to a full award.

More about lifelong learning

We use an approach called ‘fusion teaching’. This makes it possible for you to have greater choice about when you study on-campus, and when you study online – you can choose at the level of each individual course which mode you prefer (though please note students on study visas, and students on the MSc Creative Industries, need to be based entirely on-campus).

The EFI approach to teaching places student experience and choice at its heart and connects global cohorts in new ways. Students will study in teaching spaces and digital learning environments designed to enable on-site/online sharing of all teaching and learning activity. Your classes and contributions will be recorded and livestreamed so that they can be shared – and learning communities built – across modes and time-zones.

Apart from the shared core courses, most EFI postgraduate courses are delivered in intensive two-day blocks of teaching and learning activity, combined with pre- and post-intensive wraparound activity that will include a range of scheduled and self-directed activities (for example, group project activities, reading, assessment).

For more detailed information about studying one of our postgraduate programmes please select one of the six programmes to find out more.

Study with us

Interdisciplinary study is at the heart of our approach and ethos. It means the ability to synthesise and apply knowledge and skills from across different disciplines, and is crucial to addressing many current complex challenges and planetary-scale issues.

Our shared core courses are fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on diverse disciplines to support you to work creatively and ethically with all kinds of data. In addition, each programme develops interdisciplinary perspectives in the ways most appropriate to their specific domain and focus. And finally – because you have such wide choice in the optional courses you choose to take – you will have the flexibility to design your own disciplinary pathway through your studies, integrating your insights and reflecting on their interdisciplinary power through your project-related work.

In addition to the core courses you must take towards your chosen programme, we offer a portfolio of ‘shared core’ courses which all Edinburgh Futures Institute postgraduate students must take. These cover the essential and hands-on data skills, enquiry methods, ethical and creative capacities needed to underpin your programme-based studies.

These courses place you in cross-disciplinary teams with students from other programme areas, supporting you to understand what it means to approach knowledge from multiple perspectives, and use it to address complex challenges. 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, supporting you to develop a mature data philosophy while using your creative skills in the analysis and representation of data-informed and qualitative inquiry.

All programmes allow students to choose from a range of programme-specific optional courses, and from a wider portfolio of our optional courses.

Developing insights from across disciplines and applying them to complex challenges (organisational, cultural, societal or planetary) are fundamental to the aims of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. In your final project, you will be able to contribute to this agenda by applying your learning in depth to a domain, issue or concern that you care about.

For most programmes you can choose to define your own project, bring a project your employer would like you to address, work on a project set by one of our external partners or align your project to one of our research programmes.