Major Trends Higher Education Technology

Major Trends Higher Education Technology

Major Trends Higher Education – The NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition identified six trends that are likely to affect colleges and universities within the next decade in terms of how they adopt technology: two in the near term (trends whose impact will be felt in the next one or two years); two in the mid-term (three to five years out); and two in the long term (more than five years away).

1. Growing Focus on Measuring Learning (near term): There’s a renewed focus on assessment, and with it comes the need for institutions and policymakers to craft policies that will protect student privacy while at the same time capturing data that can be used to help improve outcomes.
2. Increasing Use of Blended Learning Designs (near term): Blended learning is increasingly seen as an effective way to deliver instruction. “Supportive institutional policy can foster the creation of successful blended courses,” the researchers noted. “Advancing blended learning requires the promotion of scalable innovative course designs.”
3. Redesigning Learning Spaces (mid-term): New forms of teaching may “necessitate new classroom configurations. More universities are helping to facilitate emerging pedagogies and strategies, such as the flipped classroom, by rearranging learning environments to accommodate more active learning.”
4. The Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches (mid-term): Encouraging active learning inside and outside the classroom can lead to deeper learning in which students are able to make critical connections between subject matter and the real world.
5. Advancing Cultures of Innovation (long term): According to the researchers, “There is a growing consensus among many higher education thought leaders that institutional leadership and curricula could benefit from adopting agile startup models. 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.”
6. Rethinking How Institutions Work (long term): Related to one of the “wicked challenges” facing education, “Changes in higher education are upending the traditional notion of the university and transforming the paradigm for how post-secondary learning works. These developments are being fueled by a growing body of research that highlights the disconnect between the demands of the 21st-century economy and what college graduates are prepared to do when they leave academia.”

Major Trends Higher Education – 6 Major Barriers Impeding Technology Adoption in Education

Major Trends Higher Education – NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition

Blended Learning Models