The Changing Face of Learning

The NMC (New Media Consortium) is an international community of experts in educational technology — from the practitioners who work with new technologies on campuses everyday; to the visionaries who are shaping the future of learning at think tanks, labs, and research centers; to its staff and board of directors; to the advisory boards and others helping the NMC conduct cutting edge research.

NMC has just issued its 2012 Horizon Report that examines emerging technologies and their potential impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within the higher education environment. While an important report for educators and policy makers, it’s also instructive and insightful for those responsible for organizational development.

The report identifies key trends, lays out significant challenges to be faced and examines key technologies to watch. It also maps time to adoption horizons and provides a comprehensive resource base for those wishing to go deeper into each and any of the topics covered.

Here is a summary of the key trends around which the report is centered:

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 are structured.
4. The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators.
5. Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and collaborative models.
6. There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.

Future challenges include:

1. Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
2. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
3. Economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the traditional models of tertiary education.
4. Institutional barriers present formidable challenges to moving forward in a constructive way with emerging technologies.
5. New modes of scholarship are presenting significant challenges for libraries and university collections, how scholarship is documented, and the business models to support these activities.

Technologies to watch and their adoption horizon include:

Near-term Horizon

1. Mobile apps are the fastest growing dimension of the mobile space in higher education right now, with impacts on virtually every aspect of informal life, and increasingly, every discipline in the university.
2. Tablet computing presents new opportunities to enhance learning experiences in ways simply not possible with other devices.

Mid-term Horizon

1. Game-based learning has grown in recent years as research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness for learning.
2. Learning analytics loosely joins a variety of data-gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time.

Far-term Horizon

1. Gesture-based computing moves the control of computers from a mouse and keyboard to the motions of the body, facial expressions, and voice recognition via new input devices.
2. The Internet of Things is the latest turn in the evolution of smart objects — a category of small devices or methods that enable an object to be assigned a unique identifier; contain small bits of information, such as the object’s age, shelf life, and environmental data such as temperature or humidity (and much more) attached to it; and then communicate the status of that information on demand, whether optically or via electromagnetic frequencies.

Read the Report