Horizon2007:Research Question Five

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Research Question Five

What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which learning-focused institutions approach our core missions of teaching, research, and service?

• Peer review and other academic processes, such as promotion and tenure reviews, increasingly do not reflect the ways scholarship actually is conducted. In a climate in which the established methods of peer review are grounded in print-based publications, acknowledging and verifying scholarly contributions in unusual formats can be quite difficult. Where standards are not clearly defined, it is a challenge indeed to estimate the academic significance of digital works. This affects tenure, promotion, selection of new faculty, and other academic processes as well. [Challenge carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Information literacy should not be considered given, even among “net-gen” students. The skills of critical thinking, research, and evaluation of content, not to mention creative demonstration of mastery or knowledge, are needed more than ever; yet these very skills are underdeveloped in many students. Techniques for finding and assessing relevant information from the array of resources available both on- and offline are crucial, especially in light of the rising trend toward collaborative work. [Challenge carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Intellectual property concerns and the management of digital rights and assets continue to loom as largely unaddressed issues. This is a difficulty that is growing in scope as more institutions invest in digital archives and collections. Questions of ownership, usage rights, storage, and tagging arise as collections expand. A related aspect, searching and finding, also presents challenges. [Challenge carried forward from 2006 Report]

• The typical approach of experimentally deploying new technologies on campuses does not include processes to quickly scale them up to broad usage when they work, and often creates its own obstacles to full deployment. A common model for a new use of technology in education is to see it developed and deployed in a small number of courses on a single campus. Finding ways to scale successful technologies is key to widespread adoption. [Challenge carried forward from 2006 Report]

• The phenomenon of technological "churn” is bringing new kinds of support challenges. Clearly support needs are increasing; each new technology comes with its own requirements for support, of course, while the support needs of established technologies also remain. The very pace of the churn, however, is also creating a backlash effect from those who are asked to change the way they work often just as they are settling into what once was new. [Challenge carried forward from 2006 Report]

• Personalisation - how political, social and educational organisations define this is going to have a massive impact of the quality and experience of provision.[Josie Fraser]

• Demise of the Stereotypical Student - The image remains of the college experience being one of residential, full0time status, but most students are working, commuting. [AL] We don't even use student now - it's learner, because this more helpfully recognises the value of imformal and formal learning in a life-long context [Josie Fraser]

• Economic Maybe gas prices dropped recently, but they will go back up. The unlisted costs of education (transportation, child care, insurance, etc) may drive demand for more personally time and life efficient learning [AL]

• Shrinking world where people have colleagues all over the world that they talk to daily -- and play with daily (MMOs are big in Australia, China, and Europe as well as the US and Canada). [RS]

• Growing gap between student experiences of IT and institutional and faculty realities of IT [Richard Katz] [John Weber] [IB] [NN] [AL] Yes - however, retirement/death is looming for many of our older currently technology shy educators - it's difficult to tell what the impact of this is going to be. [Josie Fraser]

• Globalization Emergence of China and India as a research and education players of global stature; Globalization generally and the need for U.S. universities to prepare a global workforce [Richard Katz](JPJ) Without 'westernising' the world [IB] All universities esp in developed economies, not just U.S. [NN] Some of the biggest online games are only usable if one speakes Chinese ;-)

• Government pressure on accountability for learning outcomes [Richard Katz] The same pressure is there in the major foundation world, too, and to a less coherent degree in funding from some private sector areas, too. At the same time, I sense great resistance in the academia (and museum world, by the way) to the notion of "assessment" as it is used by funders, and the notion of measurable "outcomes" as desired by funders seems even more foreign to your typical college professor. [John Weber]

• Continued bifurcation of education into 'elite education' and 'mass education' [Richard Katz]

• Budget Cuts Few university budgets are increasing significantly these days, while demands for new services keep growing. [Timmo Dugdale]

• Critical Thinking Popular belief is that students who are comfortable with technologies A and B will obviously be comfortable with technology X or Y. It is also believed that level of comfort translates into the ability to intelligently discern good information and tools from bad information or tools. These questions need to be studied and tracked. [Timmo Dugdale]

• Accountability How can universities be held accountable for technologies that are deployed into the classroom if more and more technologies do not reside or fall under their control? [Timmo Dugdale]

• Continued growth of the for-profit education sector [Richard Katz]

• Distance Ed demand There is a belief that demand for distance education will continue to grow. [Timmo Dugdale] There is also pressure on institutions to look at hybid and distance courses as a cost-saving strategy [Bill Shewbridge]

• Digital Divide [Timmo Dugdale] [IB] [Josie Fraser]

• Accessibility Issues All this content and technology needs to meet 508 accessibility guidelines. [Timmo Dugdale] I think accessibility is about meeting the needs of and engaging with users, not necessarily fulfilling guideline criteria, which may in fact serve to detach accessibility issues from the mainstream. Would certainly prioritise the debate and the issues! [Josie Fraser]

• Bottleneck Courses finding technology solutions to address student access to popular courses. [Timmo Dugdale]

• Instant Access University campuses struggle to respond to the expectation for quick response to technology changes. This is in conflict with the traditional culture of slow, methodical pace of change of the university culture. [Timmo Dugdale] [John Weber]

• Decline in student enrollments [Richard Katz] Richard, the answer to this vexing problem lies implicit in your new video (highly recommended!): we need a new generation of digitally authored, unique, "virtual students"! Each institution can order as many as needed to fill their classes. Of course, funders will need to get on board with this idea, since someone will have to pay the new "vStudents'" tuition! [John Weber]

• Retirement of baby boom faculty and potential faculty shortages [Richard Katz] See above... [John Weber]

• Credibility The subject of credibility is probably the most profound shift that is going on. The boundary between the real and the virtual is eroding fast and the implications of that for scholarship are profound. [Richard Katz] [IB]

• Collective intelligence. Today, amateur astronomers are connected via networks with professionals and are collectively mapping the skies. People are collaboratively writing novels, en masse, over the Internet. Sun is producing sensors that consumers can buy for $25 and soon people will be tracking weather, seismic faults, etc. in their backyards, nearby parks, etc. Amateur scholarship is knocking at the academy's door and unless the academy figures out a way to accommodate them (like CNN is accommodating amateur news people), higher education will get sidestepped. [Richard Katz](Jean Paul) Maybe the trend here is not so much Collective Intelligence but instead the Mass Amateurisation of Everything original article of that title [Scott Leslie] CrowdSourcing [Cyprien]

• User-generated content revolution [Roy Pea] I think that this is huge overall, but I'm unclear on how to make it actionable in a college teaching environment, i.e. how to create models of collective content creation that feed directly in to teaching/learning in ways that individual faculty can manage and grow at ground level in their subject areas and classrooms. [John Weber]

• Scanning the world’s libraries (Google Scholar is already changing how work is done) [Roy Pea]

• Interaction between “search” and “memory” (Google as an extension of your brain) [Roy Pea] [Josie Fraser]

• Research is NOT likely to ever integrate with teaching [Roy Pea]

• Real-time fact checking… (eg bloggers vs government and news media) [Roy Pea]

• Students voting with their feet — if classes are not interactive, they do not come [Roy Pea]

• Costs of HiEd - The cost models for both public and private higher education are broken (badly). [Lev Gonick] And the cost of new technologies—and their pace of change—increases the pain. [John Weber]

• Funding of HiEd - The funding models for both public and private higher education are broken. [Lev Gonick]

• Inter-institutional collaboration - Beyond the boutique e-MBAs brining institutions together, and the ad hoc practices of individual faculty engaged in collaborative research, we need to see working models that lessen the gap between institutional (I work at xxx university) and professional identity affiliation (I am a "name your PhD) so as to leverage and accelerate the power of the network to transform science and understanding for the common good of humanity. [Lev Gonick](Jean Paul)

• Online Identity as Lifelong Phenomenom - As our 'presence' online becomes a greater and greater part of our personal identities, there will be pressure brought to bear for institutional experiences and systems to work with already established identities instead of providing for a 'time out' from real life online [Scott Leslie]

• Time Differences Something as simple as time differences for international on-line collaboration [IB]

• Social factors such as lack of contact or face to face engagement. [IB]

• Online IP Difficulties in establishing ownership with on-line teaching. [IB]

• Assessing and Demonstrating Mastery Different ways to demonstrate learning/education (eportfolios?) [Cyprien]

• tension with non academic / non discipline specific mastery What about those who are disciplined enough to be self educated [Cyprien]

• Growing number of visual learners trapped in a text-based learning system. [SEM]

• Student not 'tied' to one institution - feathering courses and programs between insitutions. Bologna agreement initiatives, Universitas 21. Could also have a big impact on funding (from 'alumni'?). probably more like a 10-year horizon though. [NN]

• Interdisciplinarity vs Disciplinary Specialization - faculty career is tied up with increasing with specialization (academic niches) and yet interdisciplinarity is at the core to sustainability issues that are students need to deal with. Both these trends seem to be in tension and there may be a break point coming.[NN]

• enter your first response here [LJ]

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