6 Technologies That Will Impact Higher Ed
Wearable gadgets, gamification, and learning analytics are three of six technologies that will have a major impact on strategic technology planning in higher education in the next five years, according to the latest NMC Horizon Report released by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.
The annual NMC Horizon Report, released jointly by NMC and the Educause Learning Initiative, focuses on the key technology areas that researchers have identified as applicable to teaching and learning and likely to have a major impact on educational institutions within the next five years, broken down into near term, mid-term, and longer term. The report is designed to help education stakeholders grasp new and emerging technologies, identify issues involved with them, and see specific examples of their implementation in higher education. The report also identifies "critical" challenges facing education in the near future.
For the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition, researchers and analysts identified six technologies that have the potential to improve student success rates, make mobile learning a reality, break down educational barriers, enable new approaches to teaching and learning, bring desktop manufacturing to the mainstream, and allow us to interact in new ways with the world around us.
"Campus leaders and practitioners across the world use the report as a springboard for discussion around significant trends and challenges," said Larry Johnson, chief executive officer of the NMC, in a prepared statement. "The biggest trend identified by the advisory this year reflects the increasing adoption of openness on and beyond campuses, be it in the form of open content or easy access to data. This transition is promising, but there is now a major need for content curation."
Technologies That Will Impact Education in Near-Term
The most immediate trends identified in the report--those whose impact will be felt in a significant way within a year at most--were massively open online courses (MOOCs) and tablet computing.
According to the report, "The term 'massively open online course' was hardly a thought bubble during the discussions for the NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition. Over the past year, MOOCs have gained public awareness with a ferocity not seen in some time. World-renowned universities, including MIT (edX) and Stanford (Coursera), as well as innovative start-ups such as Udacity jumped into the marketplace with huge splashes, and have garnered a tremendous amount of attention--and imitation. Designed to provide high quality, online learning at scale to people regardless of their location or educational background, MOOCs have been met with enthusiasm because of their potential to reach a previously unimaginable number of learners. The notion of thousands and even tens of thousands of students participating in a single course, working at their own pace, relying on their own style of learning, and assessing each other's progress has changed the landscape of online learning."
Tablet computing is also a recent development that grew quickly to become a major phenomenon on campuses across the country--in some cases as components of BYOD programs and in others as part of campus-sponsored mobile computing initiatives.
Mid-Term Technologies
Slightly further out, the NMC Horizon report identified learning analytics and "games and gamification" as technologies whose impacts will be felt in two to three years.