Remixing the Future: A Longitudinal Study of Crowd-Sourced Scenario Design in Educational Technology

Educational futures work tends to be bounded by short planning horizons, shaped by narrow circles of decision-makers, and disconnected from the communities whose learning those plans are meant to serve. Participatory, narrative-driven methodologies offer a way to close this gap by collapsing the distance between speculative imagination and operational strategy. Across four iterations (2023–2026), the 100 Year EdTech Project has convened cross-sector participants in a crowd-sourced scenario design initiative grounded in futures literacies, narrative digital learning practices, and open remix. The methodology functions as infrastructure for collective imagination, producing immediate, actionable outputs adapted by partner organizations for varied audiences, timelines, and thematic foci. Thematic analysis at two levels, of the eight scenario videos opening the 2026 Design Summit and the eight community presentations closing it, identifies an evolution from speculative narrative to operational strategy: more shared common ground emerged across scenarios while distinctive concerns remained networked. Implications for distance education center on how crowd-sourced foresight methodologies democratize strategic imagination across institutional, geographic, and role-based boundaries.