Top Ten Trends
The technologies featured in the NMC Horizon Project are embedded within a contemporary
context that reflects the realities of the time, both in the sphere of education and in the world at large. To assure this perspective, each advisory board researches, identifies, and ranks key trends that are currently affecting the practice of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in education, and uses these as a lens for its work in predicting the uptake of emerging technologies in whatever sector is their focus.
These trends are surfaced through an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research. Once identified, the list of trends is ranked according to how significant of an impact they are likely to have on education in the next five years. The following trends have been identified as key drivers of technology adoptions in Singaporean K-12 education for the period of 2012 through 2017; they are listed here in the order they were ranked by the advisory board.
1) Enhanced electronic books are increasingly being used instead of traditional textbooks.
As e-book technology advances, digital textbooks contain more dynamic content, including audio,
videos, and other interactive features. Traditional textbooks are cumbersome and can take years to update and reprint when there is new information and discoveries to be added. E-books, however,can be more easily revised and disseminated.
2) The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is
increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators. Institutions must consider the
unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount. Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they will live is again at the forefront. Teachers must act as guides that help learners navigate through all of the content and understand how to assess it for quality.
3) Education paradigms are shifting to include online learning, hybrid learning and
collaborative models. Budget cuts have forced institutions to re-evaluate their education
strategies and find alternatives to the exclusive face-to-face learning models. Students already
spend much of their free time on the Internet, learning and exchanging new information -- often
via their social networks. Institutions that embrace face-to-face/online hybrid learning models
have the potential to leverage the online skills learners have already developed independent of
academia. We are beginning to see developments in online learning that offer different
affordances than brick-and-mortar schools, including opportunities for increased collaboration
while equipping students with stronger digital skills. Hybrid models, when designed and
implemented successfully, enable students to be at school for some activities, while using the
network for others, taking advantage of the best of both environments.
4) Interest is growing in the use of learning analytics as a tool for personalised student
learning. Learning analytics models and tools have proven successful in identifying at-risk
students early enough to help them to be successful. What is perhaps most compelling about the
topic is the ability for educators to use the data captured by these tools and adapt their teaching styles in real-time. Some companies are taking this notion a step further and building social learning platforms that act as personal learning environments with built in learning analytics that assess students’ performance based on the learning approaches they have chosen.
5) The world of work is increasingly collaborative, driving changes in the way student
projects are structured. As more and more employers are valuing collaboration as a critical skill, silos both in the workplace and at school are being abandoned in favour of collective intelligence. To facilitate more teamwork and group communication, projects rely on tools including wikis, Google Docs, Skype, and online forums. Projects are increasingly evaluated not just on the overall outcome, but also on the success of the group dynamic. In many cases, the online collaboration tool itself is an equally important outcome as it stores — and even immortalises — the process and multiple perspectives that led to the end results.
6) People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want. This
trend is certainly true for most adults, and many well-paying jobs literally can be done from
anywhere that has a mobile Internet connection. It is also true for many of today’s school-age
children, who live their lives in a state of constant connection to their peers, social groups, and family. The implications for formal learning are profound. The flipped classroom, for example, uses the resources on the Internet to free up valuable teacher classroom time, and fundamentally changes the teacher-student relationship. When students know how to use their network connections for more than texting, learning becomes much more serendipitous, opening the door to “just-in-time” learning, and “discovered” learning.
7) There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge-based and active learning.
Challenge-based learning and similar methods foster more active learning experiences, both
inside and outside the classroom. As technologies such as tablets and smartphones now have
proven applications in schools, educators are leveraging these tools, which students already use, to connect the curriculum with real life issues. The active learning approaches are decidedly more student-centred, allowing them to take control of how they engage with a subject and to brainstorm and implement solutions to pressing local and global problems. The hope is that if learners can connect course material with their own lives and their surrounding communities, then they will become more excited to learn and immerse themselves in the subject matter.
8) The growing availability of bandwidth will dramatically change user behaviours in
teaching, learning and research over the next five years. The advent of cloud computing has
alleviated the burden of storing software, email services, and other applications locally. Increased bandwidth is fundamental to full use of the Internet, and allows video, large data sets, and sophisticated mappings to be downloaded in seconds, making their impact immediate. Students and educators can now connect and collaborate with more ease, transfer files and information quicker, and store more new content.
9) Increasingly, students want to use their own technology for learning. As new technologies
are developed at a more rapid pace and at a higher quality, there is a wide variety of different
devices, gadgets, and tools from which to choose. Utilizing a specific device has become
something very personal — an extension of someone’s personality and learning style — for
example, the iPhone vs. the Android. There is comfort in giving a presentation or performing
research with tools that are more familiar and productive at the individual level. And, with
handheld technology becoming mass produced and more affordable, students are more likely to
have access to more advanced equipment in their personal lives than at school.
10) As the cost of technology drops and school districts revise and open up their access
policies, it is becoming increasingly common for students to bring their own mobile devices.
A growing number of schools are launching “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) programs so that
students can use the devices they already own in class as well as in the informal and out-of-school environments they are ubiquitous in now. This is happening partly because of how BYOD impacts budgets; schools can spend less money on technology overall if students use their own, while funneling the funds they do spend to help students who cannot afford their own devices. The interest in BYOD programs can also be attributed to an attitude shift as schools are beginning to better understand the capabilities of smartphones and other devices that still remain banned in most schools.