6 Emerging Trends Driving Technology in Education
The burden is on universities to advance the culture of innovation, "to foster environments that accelerate learning and creativity" and "to create the conditions for innovation to happen," according to a new report released Wednesday by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.
That's is one of the longer-term trends identified in the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition that will impact decision-making over the next five years, particularly in the areas of technology policy, leadership and practice.
The annual Horizon Report is developed by a panel of higher education experts to identify major developments in education technology and technological trends that will help shape teaching and learning in the near future. The researchers also identify the six most significant challenges facing education in the coming years.
Technological trends are divided up into three categories by the researchers: near-term trends, those that will drive technology adoption for the one to two years; mid-term trends, those driving adoption for the next three to five years; and long-term trends, those driving technology adoption for the next five or more years.
Long-Term Trends: Advancing the Culture of Innovation and Increasing Cross-Institution Collaboration
In order to advance the culture of innovation, the researchers argue, university leaders will have to embrace policies that will support agility.
"There is a growing consensus among many higher education thought leaders that institutional leadership and curricula could benefit from agile startup models," according to the report. "Educators are working to develop new approaches and programs based on these models that stimulate top-down change and can be implemented across a broad range of institutional settings. In the business realm, the Lean Startup movement uses technology as a catalyst for promoting a culture of innovation in a more widespread, cost-effective manner, and provides compelling models for higher education leaders to consider."
Increasing cross-institution collaboration was also cited as a longer-term technology driver and a trend that can be seen as a survival mechanism in the long run.
"A sense of solidarity with learners is leading institutions to join together with the objective of increasing accessibility, affordability, and the quality of education on a global scale," according to the report. "Deemed as a long-term trend, the prevalence of consortia underscores a vision of institutions as belonging to part of a larger ecosystem in which long-term survival and relevance in higher education relies on the mutually beneficial partnerships."
Mid-Term Trends: Measuring Learning and Open Educational Resources
Measuring learning was one of two mid-range trends identified by the Horizon Report's expert panel. There's been a growing push to measure learning data in order to drive personalized instruction, while also protecting student privacy.
"Education is embarking on a ... pursuit into data science with the aim of learner profiling, a process of gathering and analyzing large amounts of detail about individual student interactions in online learning activities," according to the report. "The goal is to build better pedagogies, empower students to take an active part in their learning, target at-risk student populations, and assess factors affecting completion and student success. For learners, educators, and researchers, learning analytics is already starting to provide crucial insights into student progress and interaction with online texts, courseware, and learning environments used to deliver instruction. Data-driven learning and assessment will build on those early efforts."