Every year, the Horizon Report, now published by EDUCAUSE, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching and learning, within the environment of higher education. The report, downloadable in PDF, is compiled by an international body of experts and provides a useful checklist trends, challenges and technologies in the field and provides a useful summary of what is most talked about in the sector now. Topics such as learner analytics, learning spaces, remote learning and micro credentialing will be familiar from previous reports. The report also covers changing political and economic contexts.
The pandemic casts a long shadow, but the report identifies a positive step change.
“Now two years into the pandemic, many “emergency remote teaching” programmes are evolving into well-designed online and hybrid learning programmes, as colleagues and universities embrace and plan for online education, not just as a stopgap but as a long-term strategic capability”.
“As we’ve learned through our pandemic experiences different modalities can be blended together in much richer, theoretically grounded ways that challenge an expand those frameworks and approaches to teaching”.
“Theirs are stories of light bulbs going off, faculty eyes being opened for the first time to the possibilities of new tools and models for education, real change in faculty practise that could far outlive the pandemic era, and faculty championing the adoption of new technology.”
However it also recognises that mainstreaming of online and hybrid education,“ bumps up against larger questions around pedagogy and institutions’ goals, involving beliefs about how people learn and what purposes education should serve”.
As you might expect, there is a strong emphasis on professional development, and in future posts we may look at some of the design-related Horizon links such as;
- The University of Sydney’s Modular Professional Learning Framework allowing teachers to choose their own adventure through 21 byte sized 2 are modules on effective teaching practices.
- The Course Success Self Review from the University of Wisconsin Madison leads teachers through a self directed course analysis.
- Duke University’s Flexible Teaching Initiative helps teachers create flexible resilient courses that can adapt to changes in modality.
