Internet of Everything and Beyond: One Technology, one Key Trend for Higher Education

One Technology, one Key Trend for Higher Education

In the Horizon Report for 2015 Higher Education Edition prepared and published by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, an EDUCAUSE Program, several key trends in making use of the ever growing technology in higher education was identified, the main challenges that impede the adoption of this technology and the important developments in educational tools using technology to the advantage of higher education. In today’s blog, let us focus our discussion on one key trend and one technology. The selected pair is closely related to each other. This one key trend that I personally perceive to be more important than the others is a mid-term trend and the estimated adoption time is between three to five years. This trend is titled the Growing Focus on Measuring Learning. We needed a special word to count the almost uncountable numbers due to its hugeness such as googolplex. There is googolplex of data being gathered at a shorter and shorter amount of time.

We have big data analytics for all sorts of pattern recognition, predictive analysis and a whole host of creative use cases for this data. Growing Focus on Measuring Learning is about collecting and using data from various sources that are relevant to education. That includes data on individual students. This data is then used to tailor a learning plan for each student based on the way they learn, their level of understanding, their pace in learning and the best teaching method to use that will help them succeed. This is using data to drive learning, teaching and performance assessment on a much finer granularity. There are verifiable numbers from data analysis. There are patterns in the data revealing hidden statistics that could be very useful as feedbacks for designing and providing effective learning programs. As we gather more and more useful data and know how to process them to our advantage, this data reflecting the real-world conditions tells us stories about our teaching methods, success/failure rate, individual student’s interaction with peers, school, friends and family members, the way they deal with homework, stress and teachers; who are the at risk students and how they perform based on their learning plan, etc.

This data-driven measuring learning trend will make use of the adaptive learning technologies that are being developed and have a time-to-adoption of four to five years. Adaptive learning technologies are educational tools to help students adapt to tailored individual learning plans designed according to their performance and inclination to learn. These tools learn how students learn and use the data to adjust the content and resources needed at any given point in time to help the student make progress. It is like personal tutors to students helping where they need extra help and the instructional materials are adjusted to pack the most impact on their success.

The trend of designing teaching methods and dispensing educational materials based on the data gotten from measuring how students learn and the adaptive learning tools to help students make progress is practiced in the online learning community with purposeful software and becoming increasingly popular not only among adult students but wide spread in higher educational circles. The ubiquitous of the Internet and the laptop being promoted as the primary tool to access learning materials are forceful drivers to sustain this trend to be the new normal. The other important force behind the trend of adopting adaptive learning technologies is the wide acceptance of educators who have tried and continue to embrace the incremental improvements by using these methods as tools to affect rewarding results by the success of the students.