Each year the New Media Consortium (NMC) gathers opinions on Technology Enhanced Learning from stakeholders around the world and publishes the findings as the Horizon Report. The reports cover a 5 year period and aim to highlight some big technological trends that are likely to have an impact on education, as well as some of the drivers of, and barriers to, technology adoption generally.
The 2015 Higher Education version of the report has just been published and is worth reading to see what may happen in TEL over the next few years. It is interesting to note that SHU has already undertaken work in many of the areas covered in the report. As a small example:
- learning spaces research informed the designs of the recent Heart of the Campus building and the new Mathematics teaching spaces at City, and will continue to influence the development of future learning spaces;
- briefing reports have been published on Learning Analytics, Open Badges and the Internet of Things;
- several faculties are beginning to use Open Badges to raise awareness of the informal/non-course specific learning that supports formal learning;
- a MOOC on Prostate Cancer Care ran towards the end of 2014 and resulted in the creation of a significant amount of Open Content;
- projects undertaken recently in the area of Digital Literacy (and the broader Digital Capability) include the development of resources, and delivery of workshops, around Social Media and pedagogically-aligned TEL, as well as making training resources such as Lynda.com available to all staff and student;
- and staff at SHU have been fundamental in the creation of cross-institutional collaborative groups, such as the Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group (MELSIG), BYOD4Learning, and the White Rose Learning Technologists’ Forum.
While the above list of examples is far from exhaustive, it seems that, if the Horizon Report is any indication, TEL is in a strong position at SHU and we are working in the right direction to meet the needs of our students in the future. It is also worth pointing out that few of these examples are the result of individuals or teams working in isolation, for the most part they represent work from groups made up of staff from different faculties and central services, and often have either direct student involvement or some level of student input.
The full Horizon Report 2015 can be freely downloaded, and the Times Higher has published summaries of two of the three main sections: Trends accelerating technology adoption; and Challenges impeding technology adoption.
