Mobile devices are one year away from transforming education. For the third straight year.
The 2011 Horizon Report, an annual look at technology trends affecting higher education, points to mobile devices as one of six technologies to watch. Of the other five trends, game-based learning and learning analytics—using data to track student progress—are new additions for 2011.
The report, produced by the New Media Consortium and Educause, notes that mobile devices have been listed before, but it says that resistance by many schools continues to slow the full integration of mobile devices into higher education.
Game-based learning is poised to see greater use within the next two to three years, the report says, and will follow one of two tracks. Game-playing itself may be used to develop decision-making and problem-solving abilities, as well as leadership skills, or educational content embedded into games can teach students as they play. The report points to multiplayer role-playing games as offering particular promise for higher education.
Learning analytics, the other new trend, is further down the line, with the report’s panel of 43 experts pegging its adoption as four to five years away. Using the growing amount of data available about students, learning analytics would allow instructors to tailor education more specifically to each student’s needs and make curricular changes on the fly. It also could help instructors gauge how well students are learning. Beyond traditional measures of assessment, such as assignments and tests, educators could look at online social interactions, discussion posts, and how students access information on Web sites to develop a more detailed, and timely, picture of a student’s understanding of course material. Challenges to adoption include incorporating information coming from a variety of sources and in different formats and concerns about privacy and profiling.
Of the trends that have been listed in other years, the use of electronic books is the one most likely to affect higher education in the next year, the report notes. While e-books have steadily grown in popularity among consumers, the report says adoption by the academic community was slowed by issues such as a limited number of available titles, restrictive publishing models, and rights issues. Those are mostly resolved, the report says, but accessibility issues remain.
Augmented reality, the layering of virtual information over actual locations, such as an interactive, mobile-based museum map, is another up-and-coming trend. It is two to three years away from adoption in education. Finally, gesture-based computing, which incorporates human movement, is already useful in training simulations, the report notes, and could allow students to virtually practice surgery or flip through a centuries-old text. It’s already seen commercial applications in popular video game systems such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect for Xbox. But the report says it is probably four to five years away from widespread use by colleges.
To complement the report, which is in its ninth year of publication, the New Media Consortium this year designed the Horizon Project Navigator, a social-media site to offer access to the materials experts looked at in preparing the report and share information related to the identified technology trends.
4 Responses to 6 Top Tech Trends on the Horizon for Higher Education
arrive2__net - February 8, 2011 at 9:18 pm
This report is really informative, although I wonder if the time horizons aren’t … optimistic … since getting people to work on one project long enough to develop the teaching technology would seem to be a challenge. Based on the rate of change suggested, all time spend on developing applications is time spent not keeping up with technological change. The executive summary also says that although Digital Media Literacy skills are critical for the future, they change so fast that you can’t even write curriculum before they’ve changed, and that new information is generated so fast researchers and teachers can’t keep up, and need tech help just to comprehend what is going on. Well, the future stacks up to be an inviting yet challenging place to live.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
rsebek - February 9, 2011 at 10:26 am
“Scholarly journals are beginning to appear in electronic form as well.” That will comes as a surprise to all the librarians who have been working with ejournals since the 90s.
11272784 - February 9, 2011 at 11:41 am
Meanwhile, at this public research university, we are still trying to convince a core of faculty to stop writing on the whiteboard and to use a Smartboard so we can capture their lectures effectively. They won’t build a complete online course, they assume that recording lectures = distance education.
I am always delighted by the number of faculty members who can step outside themselves long enough to consider how their class looks to students trying to use the materials they create. I’m also dumbfounded by the number of faculty members who refuse to even consider whether their chalkboard and whiteboard scribbles can be read by students more then three rows back in the classroom.
Effective use of technology is MUCH further away in some classrooms than others – not because of limitations in technology, but because of limitations in the faculty members. Many of them need to retire and get out of the way.
spellettieri - February 9, 2011 at 11:57 am
These sound like exciting developments. I have a feeling students will have iPad type devices and be connected to the net and learning games a lot more in the future. Everything will also be in the cloud. All computing and data will be stored externally and people will use websites to do all their work.