Abstract:

What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions?

Which trends and technology developments will drive educational change?

What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions?

Damian McDonald, Blended Learning Enhancement Manager from the University of Leeds in the UK is one of the 58 experts from all over the world who helped to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) that seeks to answer these very questions.

The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in colleges and universities across the globe. With more than 14 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.

This year our panel of experts agreed on two long-term impact trends: advancing cultures of innovation, as well as fundamentally rethinking how universities and colleges work, and these are just two of the 18 topics analysed in the NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition, indicating the key trends, significant challenges, and important technological developments that are very likely to impact changes in higher education around the world over the next five years.

Regarding the major obstacles for higher education, blending formal and informal learning is considered one of the solvable challenges - one that is already being addressed by programs at individual institutions. On the other hand, the experts identified balancing learners’ connected and unconnected lives as a wicked challenge i.e. one that is impossible to define, let alone solve.

In view of the trends and challenges observed, the panel also signalled the technological developments that could support these drivers of innovation and change. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), along with learning analytics and adaptive learning, are expected to be increasingly adopted by higher education institutions in one year’s time or less to make use of mobile learning and student data that can be gathered through online learning environments.

The time-to adoption for augmented and virtual reality, along with makerspaces, is estimated within two to three years, while affective computing and robotics are expected to be more prominent in colleges and universities within four to five years.

Education Leaders worldwide look to the NMC Horizon Project and both its global and regional reports as key strategic technology planning references, and it is our hope that our research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe.

Keywords:

Blended Learning, emerging technologies, innovation, bring your own device, learning analytics, adaptive learning, augmented reality, makerspaces.