Campus Technology Insider Podcast May 2021
Listen: 2021 Teaching and Learning Trends: What the Horizon Report Means for IT
00:13
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, executive editor for Campus Technology, and your host.
For many years, the Horizon Report has been tracking trends, technologies and key practices in teaching and learning. But this year, there's one striking difference: the impact of a global pandemic on practically every aspect of higher education. In some ways, colleges and universities may never be the same. But in other ways, trends that were important before COVID-19 have persisted, even as we view them through a new lens. To make sense of it all, I spoke with Kathe Pelletier, director of Educause's Teaching and Learning Program and co-author of the report, about key technology trends, their impact on IT departments, new education models, and more. Here's our chat.
Hi Kathe, welcome to the podcast.
Kathe Pelletier: Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
Kelly: So I want to talk about the new Teaching and Learning Edition of the Horizon Report. But first, I thought we could reflect over the past year a bit, because it's just stunning to me to think that last year's report, you know, it came out in early March, I can remember. And we were basically on the brink of a global pandemic and largely unaware of the challenges that were ahead. Was that something that went into the thinking in this year's report?
01:45
Pelletier: Yeah, it's really crazy to look back and think about how much has changed since then. In the early stages, the project, we really spent a lot of time thinking about how much we wanted to, I'll put in quotes, allow the pandemic to impact the discussions of the panel. And it's really funny to think about how naive we were back then. And, you know, of course, the pandemic has affected so many areas of all of our lives globally. But we really naively wanted to rise above it or something like that. And which just goes to show how it's impossible to predict the future. But, but we really quickly realized that it was impossible to extricate the pandemic and the panel discussions and really kind of leaned into it. And one thing that came out that I thought was really interesting is that, as you probably have noticed, if you've read the report, that several of the trends did persist from 2020. And those were mental health, the digital divide, and funding for higher education, for example. But even those trends have kind of a pandemic flavor. So, you know, for example, we know that 80 percent of students reported, early on in the pandemic even, that their mental health was worse off, compared with before. And in the Los Angeles school system, a striking one in four households lacked essential network access. So in terms of digital divide, that's a really stark example. And then, in terms of the funding for higher education, we learned in an Educause quick poll that two-thirds of respondents reported budget cuts to their IT units in the 2021, or 2020 to 2021, academic year. So even though the trends seem to carry over from last year, COVID really flavored what they looked like in this year. And I'm happy to talk about the new trends, too, which is really interesting and of course, flavored by the pandemic as well. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about methodology. And I don't want to geek out too much, but I think it's really interesting. So we use what's called the modified Delphi method that we've adapted from the Institute for the Future. And our first step is to scan for different types of macro trends. So we look for social, technological, environmental, economic, and political trends. And we have the lovely acronym of STEEP that helps you to remember those. And this year, the entire set of trends in the technological category are completely brand new, which is not surprising when you think about higher ed's really abrupt leap to delivering remote learning. And so, you know, for example, we've got widespread adoption of hybrid learning models, increased use of learning technologies, and online faculty development. So you know, if you look back to early 2020, I don't think anyone would have guessed that these would have come out as Horizon Report trends. And there's, you know, a ton of examples in the kind of signals or the evidence for these trends, that the pandemic obviously shaped the way that we were using and even finding new technologies to use in the classroom.