Introducing the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition. This report is a
collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the ELI EDUCAUSE Learning
Initiative. In this report, the Horizon Project expert panel selected six key trends, significant
challenges, and important developments in educational technology very likely to impact
planning and decision-making over the next five years.
The key trends expected to accelerate technology adoption in higher education are
placed on three timelines: long-term trends, mid-term trends, and short-term trends.
Advancing cultures of change and innovation and increasing cross-institution collaboration are
expected to be around for five or more years.
Advancing cultures of change and innovation reflects a broader trend in society in which
businesses are adapting their strategies to remain relevant. There is a need for policies in
higher ed that more aggressively support agility.
Collective action among universities is growing in importance for the future of higher education.
Combining resources in today's global environment allows universities to cross borders
and work toward common goals concerning technology, research, and shared values.
In the mid-term trends: growing focus on measuring learning and proliferation of open
educational resources.
Measuring learning is all about using data to personalize the learning experience. Learning
analytics is the key element of this trend which aims to provide crucial insights into student
progress and interaction with online texts, courseware, and learning environments.
Open educational resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in
the public domain for free use and repurposing by others. It's gaining traction across campuses, but
its broader acceptance in the higher education hinges on the issue of awareness and
accessibility.
For the next one to two years, the panel expects increasing use of blended learning and
redesigning learning spaces to be adopted in higher education.
Blended learning has become popular as perceptions of online learning as a viable
alternative to face to face learning have been shifting toward more favorable. To implement
blended learning will require concrete online learning guidelines and continuous visionary
leadership.
Many higher education professionals have started to rethink how learning spaces should be
configured after a student-centered approach has become more popular. The traditional classroom
mold is being broken to accommodate flexible and active learning.
Next up are the significant challenges impeding technology adoption in higher education. These
range from those challenges we understand and know how to solve to the wicked challenges that
are complex to even address.
The solvable challenges are blending informal and formal learning and improving digital literacy.
Blending formal and informal learning is a challenge due to lack of ways to acknowledge
and qualify learning that happens beyond the classroom. National policies that guide the
substantiation of informal learning across education systems will help formally evaluate
those experiences.
Digital literacy is a new category of competence, and the challenge is that a lack of consensus on
what comprises digital literacy is impeding many colleges and universities from formulating
adequate policies and programs that address this challenge.
Difficult challenges are trickier because we understand them but solutions are elusive.
Personalizing learning and teaching complex thinking were chosen by the panel to be difficult
challenges facing higher education.
Personalized learning refers to the range of educational programs, learning experiences,
instructional approaches, and academic support strategies intended to address the specific
learning needs, interests, aspirations or cultural backgrounds of individual students. The biggest
barrier is that scientific data-driven approaches to effectively facilitate personalization have only
recently begun to emerge.
Higher order thinking is not only a valuable skill in today's world but necessary for understanding
and solving complex real-world problems. Encouraging and teaching complex thinking is
challenging because educators have only just started articulating this multifaceted need in
higher education.
And for wicked challenges: competing models of education and rewarding teaching.
New models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional
models of higher education. Across the board, institutions are looking for ways to provide a high
quality of service and more learning opportunities at lower costs.
Teaching is often rated lower than research in academia. Funding and prestige are derived from
institutions' scholarly imprint, which has created an inhospitable environment for those who like to
teach. Three main points of this challenge are the need to prioritize teaching and learning over
research, the importance of training faculty members to teach at a first-rate standard, and for
policymakers and thought leaders to push institutions of higher education to reevaluate their
missions so that teaching is a keystone.
Finally, the report addresses important developments in educational technology. On the
one year or less adoption horizon: BYOD and flipped classrooms.
Bring your own device was a phrase coined by Intel in 2009, referring to the practice of people
bringing their own laptops, tablets, and smartphones to learning and work environments.
BYOD is less about devices for higher education and more about the personalized content users
have loaded onto them.
In the flipped classroom model, valuable class time is devoted to higher cognitive, more active,
project-based learning where students learn to work together to solve local or global challenges
to gain deeper understanding. In the flipped classroom model, students watch video lectures,
take online quizzes, read passages, and more at home, which frees up class time for more
immersive learning.
In two to three years, expect to see makerspaces and wearable technology become more widely
adopted in higher education.
Makerspaces, also known as hackerspaces, hack labs, and fab labs, are community-oriented
workshops where tech enthusiasts share and explore electronic hardware, manufacturing tools,
and programming tricks. As they become a more relevant part of cultural and economic
discussions, universities are taking advantage of makerspaces to provide students and faculty
a place to do their tinkering.
Wearable technology is not a new category, but it's poised to see significant growth in coming
years, spurring experiments in higher education. A recent poll showed 21% of U.S. adult students
use wearables.
And in the four to five year adoption horizon: adaptive learning technologies and the Internet of
Things.
Adaptive learning technologies refer to software and online platforms that adjust to individual
students' needs as they learn. The emergence of adaptive learning technologies reflects a
movement in academia toward customizing learning experiences for each individual.
The Internet of Things is a network of connected objects that link the physical world with the world
of information through the web. Enabling technologies such as smart sensors and chips
are all well understood, easily mass-produced, and inexpensive, and a number of universities are
already incorporating the IoT technologies on their campuses.
Download your copy of the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition now.