Key Trends

As it does each year, the Horizon Advisory Board again reviewed key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity, and ranked those it considered most important for campuses to watch. Trends were identified through a careful analysis of interviews, articles, papers, and published research. The six trends below emerged as most likely to have a significant impact in education in the next five years. They are presented in priority order as ranked by the Advisory Board.

• The environment of higher education is changing rapidly. Costs are rising, budgets are shrinking, and the demand for new services is growing. Student enrollments are declining. There is an increasing need for distance education, with pressure coming not only from nontraditional students seeking flexible options, but from administrative directives to cut costs. The “shape” of the average student is changing, too; more students are working and commuting than ever before, and the residential, full-time student is not necessarily the model for today’s typical student. Higher education faces competition from the for-profit educational sector and an increasing demand by students for instant access and interactive experiences.
• Increasing globalization is changing the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.  China, India, and other southeast Asian nations continue to develop skilled researchers and thinkers who contribute significantly to the global body of knowledge and whose work fuels much innovation. Additionally, globalization of communication, entertainment, and information provides students with wider perspectives and resources than ever before, placing them in a new and continually changing learning space.
• Information literacy increasingly should not be considered a given. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the information literacy skills of new students are not improving as the post-1993 Internet boomlet enters college. At the same time, in a sea of user-created content, collaborative work, and instant access to information of varying quality, the skills of critical thinking, research, and evaluation are increasingly required to make sense of the world.
• Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are eased.
• The notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship. Amateur scholars are weighing in on scholarly debates with reasoned if not always expert opinions, and websites like the Wikipedia have caused the very notion of what an expert is to be reconsidered. Hobbyists and enthusiasts are engaged in data collection and field studies that are making real contributions in a great many fields at the same time that they are encouraging debate on what constitutes scholarly work—and who should be doing it. Still to be resolved is the question of how compatible the consensus sapientum and the wisdom of the academy will be.
• Students’ views of what is and what is not technology are increasingly different from those of faculty. From small, flexible software tools to ubiquitous portable devices and instant access, students today experience technology very differently than faculty do, and the gap between students’ view of technology and that of faculty is growing rapidly. Mobile phones, to name just one example, are very different tools to students than to faculty; rather than being mere tools for voice communication, these devices store music, movies, and photos, keep students in touch with their friends by text and voice, and provide access to the wider world of the Internet at any time.

Critical Challenges

The 2007 Horizon Project Advisory Board also considered critical challenges facing higher education over the five-year time period described in this report, and there were many identified. The six challenges listed below were ranked as most likely to impact teaching, learning, and creative expression in the coming years, and appear in priority order as determined by the Advisory Board.

• Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers. Both at the student and at the professional level, assessment is lagging behind creative work. Learning that takes place in interdisciplinary, context-rich environments such as games and simulations is still difficult to evaluate. Capturing a portfolio of work, when much of that work takes place in new media forms like blogs, podcasts, and videos, poses a problem for learners and for professors seeking tenure.
• There are significant shifts taking place in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning, and a profound need for leadership at the highest levels of the academy that can see the opportunities in these shifts and carry them forward. At few points in the history of the academy has there been an opportunity to really impact the ways in which learners and scholars  interact. We are seeing the convergence of many new ideas on how we work, learn and interact, and it will take visionary leadership to see and capitalize on these shifts. At the same time, few leaders are following critical trends such as those listed in the previous section, and fewer still are speaking out on the issues that accompany them. The thoughtful perspectives of university presidents, provosts, and other learning-focused leaders, for example, could temper the moral panics that hamper effective conversations on critical topics such as digital rights, online safety, and access. Needed changes in faculty reward, promotion, and tenure processes will almost certainly not occur without visionary leadership.
• While progress is being made, issues of intellectual property and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done. Intellectual property law presents a number of challenges to institutions of higher education. As universities amass more and more digital material, they need to find ways to protect existing copyright, safely share material, and address issues of digital ownership to meet their legal obligations and their own interests as holders of intellectual property. Additionally, while remixing content is a rising trend, it is unclear what is acceptable and what infringes on the rights of the original creator.
• There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content. Although new tools make it increasingly easy to produce multimedia works, students lack essential skills in composition, storytelling, and design. In addition, faculty need curricula that adapt to the pace of change and that teach the skills that will be needed—even though it is not clear what all those skills may be.
• The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.  Collaborative work continues to be a critical component of scholarly activitites. The phenomenon of social networking is a direct response to this challenge, as the educational community is finding ways to connect and contribute using social networking tools. Collaborative experiences in virtual worlds, massively multiplayer games, and emerging forms of scholarly work are also on the horizon.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices. The expectation of anytime, anywhere access has not diminished. We are beginning to see examples of university services and content delivered to mobile phones, and this trend will increase as students put pressure on campuses to offer meaningful content via mobile devices.

These challenges and trends reflect the changing nature of the way we seek, classify, and perceive information, all crucial activities in teaching, learning, and creative expression. They provide a framing perspective with which to consider the possible effects of the six technologies described in this edition of the Horizon Report.

Technologies to Watch

The technologies featured in the 2007 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that represent what the Advisory Board considers likely timeframes for their widespread adoption on university campuses. The first adoption horizon assumes the likelihood of broad adoption within the next year; the second, adoption within two to three years, and the third, adoption within four to five years.

The two technologies that appear on this year’s nearest adoption horizon, user-created content and social networking, are already established on many campuses, and examples are readily available. Those in the mid-term horizon, mobile phones and virtual worlds, are not hard to find on campuses with leading-edge technologists and adventuresome faculty. Naturally, the farthest horizon contains the two least-adopted topics: new scholarship and emerging forms of publication, and massively multiplayer educational gaming; but even in this horizon practical examples exist, though they are still in development or in experimental stages.

In the body of the report, each featured technology includes specific examples, but as the horizon moves farther out in time these tend to be more isolated. Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

• User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.
• Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.
• Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.
• Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world—or diverge wildly from it—present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.
• The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like—and how new scholars might work.
• Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones.

Not unlike last year, some of these topics will seem familiar to regular readers of the Horizon Report. Educational gaming, a mid-term horizon topic last year, appears here in two variants: virtual worlds and massively multiplayer educational gaming. Over the past year, it has become clear that these topics, while related, are not simply two sides of the same  coin. Virtual worlds are not games, but spaces where many sorts of activities might occur, most of them social. Massively multiplayer games sometimes take place in virtual worlds, but not always. They are more structured, with clear goals and objectives built in, and players interact with the setting in ways that are generally very different than the ways one might interact with the elements of an open-ended virtual world.

Mobile phones also make a reappearance, in the same horizon as last year but nonetheless a year closer. The networks to support them have arrived (or very nearly so), and the capabilities of phones have continued to increase at a rapid pace. Campuses are beginning to implement programs that provide every student with a cell phone, much as they have done with computers in the past. Clearly, the use of the mobile phone as an educational tool is becoming more widespread and accepted.

Social computing and personal broadcasting, topics from last year’s report, have ties to this year’s social networking and user-created content, but there are important differences. Social networking is more about connecting with the wider community, whereas social computing (now so well established that it has all but lost its name) has to do with tools that facilitate collaborative work. Personal broadcasting is one facet of user-generated content, and is likewise so commonplace just one year later that it is widely found on campuses in the form of scholarly blogs and podcasts.

We have watched these returning and related technologies move closer, develop offshoots that have moved faster or slower than their parent topics, and become so much a part of daily life that the technology is transparent and the content shines through. In the coming years, the same changes will influence the six topic areas selected for the 2007 Horizon Report, and we will watch with interest their effect on campuses.