NMC Horizon Report

Higher Ed Trends: MOOCs, Tablets, Gamification, and Wearable Tech

February 7, 2013 | 11:26 AM | By Katrina Schwartz

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

As tech tools continue to proliferate with new launches and new products, it’s difficult to predict what will stick and what won’t. A recently released report by the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) tries to sift through the fads and find the few that will have a real impact on education in the next few years.

What’s worth noting? Sometimes what seemed impossible only a few years ago has already become a new trend. The 2013 NMC Horizon’s Report on Higher Education, which brings together international experts in education and technology, attempts to take the pulse of emerging technologies in higher education and predict where the field will move in the near, middle and far term.

The report points to MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, as the big change agent in the higher ed landscape, but it also reaches a little further, bringing 3D printing and wearable technology into the mix.

KEY FACTORS

The panel considered some key factors influencing whether technologies take hold, identifying a move towards “open” content and the ability to share, manipulate, and mold. Even more critical for institutions of higher education is the rise of MOOCs. As more elite institutions align themselves Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, big data, gamification, Higher Education, learning analytics, MOOC, NMC Horizon Report

Six Lingering Obstacles to Using Technology in Schools

June 20, 2012 | 11:19 AM | By MindShift

Flickr:Marygrove College Library

Though educators are finding smart ways to integrate technology and learning, the road has been and continues to be challenging on multiple fronts. The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education, takes the birds-eye view and encapsulates some of the significant challenges that must still be addressed and offers the following assessment.

Behind the challenges listed here is also a pervasive sense that local and organizational constraints are likely the most important factors in any decision to adopt — or not to adopt — a given technology. Even K-12 institutions that are eager to adopt new technologies may be constrained by school policies, the lack of necessary human resources, and the financial wherewithal to realize their ideas. Still others are located within buildings that simply were not designed to provide the radio frequency transparency that wireless technologies require, and thus find themselves shut out of many potential technology options. While acknowledging that local barriers to technology adoptions are many and significant, the advisory board focused its discussions on challenges that are common to the K-12 community as a whole. The highest ranked challenges they identified are listed here, in the order in which the advisory board ranked them.

1. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession, especially teaching. This challenge appears at the top of the list because despite the widespread agreement on the importance of digital media literacy, training in the supporting skills and techniques is still very rare in teacher education. As classroom professionals begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.

2. K-12 must address the increased blending of formal and informal learning. Traditional lectures and subsequent testing are still dominant learning vehicles in schools. In order for students to get a well- rounded education with real world experience, they must also engage in more informal in-class activities as well as learning to learn outside the classroom. Most schools are not encouraging students to do any of this, nor to experiment and take risks with Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, CoSN, ISTE, NMC Horizon Report

What’s On the Horizon in Higher Education

February 22, 2012 | 12:46 PM | By Tina Barseghian

Flickr: Dexterwas

How will college life be different in five years than it is today? In its recently released 2012 NMC Horizon Report on Higher Education, New Media Consortium predicts there may be more gesture-based computing, and lots of inter-connected (and Internet-connected) objects packed with useful information.

Video games will become more commonplace in classrooms, and Big Data will drive big decisions on the part of students, faculty, and the foundations and companies in the education sphere.

The Horizon Report crystallizes a lot of what we’re witnessing in education. But one notable category isn’t addressed in this otherwise comprehensive report: how open education resources — mostly free, customizable, content — is disrupting higher ed, allowing teachers to create their own textbooks, and changing state policy on using print books (more on this later.) And in that vein, the legacy of Stanford’s free online classes, which attracted tens of thousands of learner, and the evolution of MIT’s certification of its free online classes, which leads us to question how “informal learning” will affect the value of the traditional college degree.

What the report does focus on are six technologies to watch, categorized in the near, middle, and foreseeable future. The report’s Key Trends enumerates this in its summary:

1. People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to.

2. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

3. The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student projects Continue reading →