So what role will IT play in teaching and learning in 5 years?

So what role will IT play in teaching and learning in 5 years? Now that's an interesting question. I guess to even start address this question you have to take a big step back and look at who will higher education be serving in 5 years and in what will delivery systems be like.

Who will we be serving? Look at who we are serving now. At community colleges we serve working adults and younger students with specific career goals or a desire to transfer to four year schools. This number has always been large, but will get larger with a continued need to train and retrain for careers. The more traditonal 18-22 year old student bachelor's degree seeking is not going away. At many public colleges the applicant numbers are generally strong, although some surveys show declines particularly at four year private colleges. Students and parents feel that a bachelors degree is a necessity. At private four years colleges the applicant numbers are mixed with smaller less famous schools struggling a bit to fill their classes and more elite colleges doing well in this area. Graduate school enrollments are declining according to the New York Times . It probably safe to say that this will not improve a great deal in the next five years. What we will see is probably an environment where people want to go back to sschool, but they have more critical issues to address. Layoffs of part-time students, parents or spouses has something to do with the decline, but so does the general uncertainy about investing in anything. Even if you have a job, will you have one next week? Will this still be the case in five years? Maybe.

So what role will technology play down the road a bit? I think for the 18-22 year residential student, things will not change dramatically. This faculty in this space has totally embraced in-class technology, but sadly many just use PowerPoint. There are a few innovators, but these are the few exceptions. We will see more blended courses (mix of traditonal lecture and web content including audio/video) and some additonal flipped courses (pre-recorded lectures presented online before face to face classes). The college faculty of today, in this environment still seem resistent to new modes of teaching. Blended learning and flipped courses will do very well at community colleges where the students are often older and have jobs or family responsibilities. Tech assisted courses will be a major attrraction for these students who value flexibility. I am curious to see how MOOCs (massive open online courses) will do. I am expectng that these will not offer a challenge to more traditonal programs, but they will provide access to under served groups and will be profitable. I cannot imagine someone doing an entire degree using the MOOC option. I am VERY curious to see how companies like StraighterLine will do. Straighter line offers general education courses for a monthly membership fee of $99. They have a number of accredited colleges that will take their courses in transfer. This will have great appeeal to the adult learner who needs flexibility or wants to "catch up" enroute to a degree. When you start looking broadly at the global community of learners, you have to wonder how programs like the University Of The People will do. Free college degrees for the financially challenged? Wow.

Graduate education will change quite a bit. The costs have risen and most employers are not willing to subsidize it. Going full-time is hard because of the costs and graduate assistantships will be hard to get. If the country needs for advanced degrees in the science or technology ares, there will have to be more financial aid. The return on investment for a graduate degree is just not there. For those who do go to graduate school part-time online, there will be many options. There are many online degree programs and these are not nearly as unacceptable as they once were. Colleges that are not developing online graduate programs may find themselves with few or no students in the next few years.I think this will be particularly true of the non-research colleges that offer masters in education, the liberal arts, or business. Many of these programs will dissappear.

So as we look down the road a few years I think we will see few changes on the four year undergraduate college/university, although there may be a few less of them. Graduate education will move online for all but heavily research based degrees. Enrollments will generally continue to fall. The most interesting area will be the options open to part-time learners in the North America and the online options for potential learners in the third world. Degrees and advanced education for this group will soar, thanks to the internet and growing connectivity. The landscape will change pretty quickly as more education is needed in order to find the few "good jobs" out there, but cost and the lack of flexibility of traditonal models are major obstacles.

(Special thanks to Educause Live for some of the info about alternative higher education providers.)

Trends in College Teaching and Learning 2012

This has been interesting year in the instructional technology world. Blackboard is still buying much of the competition. The latest being MoodleRooms. You can still use Moodle as your learning management system, but you have to either maintain it yourself or find another partner. Sakai is still going strong as one of the few remaining alternatives to Blackboard. Putting this aside, there are some major trends to watch with multiple vendors in each space. Regardless of the discipline, I think all areas of higher education should be looking at the following to extend their teaching and extending learning is THE major trend. Extending learing beyond the traditional classroom.

First, let me state that I am not talking about making major changes in the content of courses or suggesting that ALL faculty should be pressured into adopting any of the followign trends or technologies. These are personal choices that individual faculty have to make. Here is what I am seeing:

Communication/Collaboration - Collaboration outside the classroom is the biggest change I have seen in over 30 years in higher education. A few years back we have been amazed at the idea of answering student questions in virtual office hours; having students in traditonal classes collaborate online without regard to to time or distance; working with students or colleagues from other universities in real time or asychronous research or class projects; bringing virtual quest speakers into the classroom using Skype or some other free tool; continuing relationships made during study abroad experiences well after returning home with teleconferencing; creating a class or campus research publication with a tool like Digital Commons or a class wiki; having creative writing students share their work with a personal blog; and creating short instructional videos with a cell phone or Flip camera. This list could go on. Notice that I did not mention Blackboard or other learning managment system (LMS) in this paragraph. The LMS has become a baseline toolset for teaching, but any of the tools noted above can be used without the LMS.

Mobile Apps - This is a really new space and largely undeveloped in my view. It has great potential, but the jury is still out. At the very least though colleges should have a campus level mobile strategy that includes a smart phone hehicle web site and access to the LMS. I have said before, ALL of your student prospects from this point on will likely get their first impression of your campus on their phones. The view had better be good and easy to navigate. I have to say that the Blackboard Mobile Learn product is easy to deploy and gets the job done in a flash. Your students can access their class pages and see grades, assignments, and even turn in an assignment all from their phone. Now that 70% of current undergraduates have smart phones, this is the bare minimum that a college can get by with. The next step is access to your student administrative systems. Within a year some basic access to grades, financial aid status, admissions application information, and perhaps bill payment will be expected. I would look for apps that can help student researchers to collect data, take photos, record audio interviews, and other data collecting activities. Speciality apps that can do all sorts of things will be available in short order. After all there are over 600,000 Apple apps already out there.

Big Data - This is the latest buzz phrase in IT referring to lots of data, as the name implies. Applied to higher education, I think big data refers to data warehousing and/or analytics used for decison making and of courses research. Here campuses have options. For analytics are their a host of analytics tools and dashboard type applications. The key question here is "what do you really need?". Most vendors are selling very slick user interfaces with green, yellow, and red lights and other cool do-dads. Frankly, I have not seen a campus use these to date. Most could do just as well with timely automated reports. I have not found a President whop really wants to look at an Admissions dashboard. Collecting lots of data and creating useable data models for decison IS adviseable, but it can be done in may ways. My advice, is to generate questions first and then find the data to answer the questions. I would also take a look at constituent relationship software like Sales Force for Higher Education (CRM) or Blackboard Analytics. Of course there are other products out there as well. Again, I suggest thinking about what you need and how you want to see it before buying. This will help you leverage your big data about potential and current students to make decisions, communicate, inform, and intervene at just the right moment. On the research side, things are even better. You can create virtual computing environments in a flash for on campus applications and you can rent space and computing cycles in the cloud for a very low price. Just for an example, chack out Amazon and for smaller storage needs drop box. More on research tools later.

Communication, mobile, and big data are the hot items right now for higher education technology, in my view.