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.