Students on this programme study the following:

A portfolio of ‘shared core’ courses (40 credits) which teach the essential critical and hands-on data skills, enquiry methods, ethical and creative capacities needed to underpin your programme-based studies.
Core courses (20 credits) specific to your programme.
A project (taking the form of a 20-credit ‘integration and project planning’ course, and a 40-credit final project).
A wide choice of short 10 credit optional courses (60 credits), at least two of which must be on topics related to your programme, with scope to study across the entire EFI portfolio.
Core courses
You will take the following core courses for your programme:

Data Ethics as a Practice
Data and AI Ethics, Law and Governance
You will also take the following 10 credit shared core courses, which are compulsory for Edinburgh Futures Institute students on all programmes:

Interdisciplinary Futures
Insights through Data or Text Remix (choose one)
Ethical Data Futures
Representing Data or Building Near Futures (choose one)
On all of these shared core courses, you will be in cross-disciplinary teams with students from other programme areas. You will learn to collect, manage and analyse computational datasets, and to use emerging methodologies for mapping and designing the future. You will also learn the fundamentals of data ethics, and how to use creative skills in the analysis and representation of data-informed and qualitative inquiry.

Optional courses
Edinburgh Futures Institute offers a wide portfolio of about 40-50 optional courses taught by academic staff from across many discipline areas including approximately six to eight courses on topics associated with your programme. The exact courses will vary from year to year – in 2023-24 the courses associated with your programme may include:

Democracy, Rights and the Rule of Law in the Data-Driven Society
Translational AI and Data Ethics
Algorithmic Bias, Fairness and Justice
Ethics of Robotics and Autonomous Systems
Optional courses from across the wider portfolio will cover a range of themes and topics, such as:

Critical perspectives on how new technologies are changing society
Data, programming and research skills that advance the skills taught in the EFI shared core
How new and rapidly changing technologies and data sources are transforming the future of democracy
What the future of education might look like
How narratives drive the way we understand the world
Bringing service design and service management together to build change in a data-driven society
Current challenges and futures for the creative industries
The project
In your final project, you will be able to apply your learning in depth to a domain, issue or concern which drives you. It could be based on your own personal or professional interests, defined by your employer, sponsored by one of EFI’s industry, government or community partners, or aligned to one of our research programmes. You can submit your final project report as a written piece of work, or combine text with other forms as appropriate – for example, video, visualisation, a digital artefact, performance, code. You will provisionally identify your project topic relatively early on in the programme, and work on it in parallel with the taught courses. We expect projects to take an interdisciplinary approach which connects with the creative, data and future-oriented nature of the EFI core.