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Similarly, the field of education is facing enormous pressure to adapt to technology as educators figure out how to meet the needs of students in a personalized, meaningful and timely manner based on best practices.

By designing a curriculum that collects data at every step of the student learning process, universities can address student needs with customized modules, assignments, feedback and learning trees in the curriculum that will promote better and richer learning."

Initially in many institutions the move will be crude pedagogically, with an emphasis on video recording of lectures and flipped classes, or merely increasing the amount of online learning supporting regular classes. Over time, though, as instructors get more experience in hybrid learning, get more instructional design support, and greater pressure from the administration, full course re-design will increase, but major redesigns around hybrid learning may take as long as five years in many institutions. One reason for this slow adoption of re-design is the current lack of appropriate models for hybrid learning that have been tested and evaluated; this will change though as experience grows. Best practice for hybrid learning will emerge, as it did for fully online learning.

10. Expect the unexpected: One year: 100%; Three years: 100%; Five years: 100% These are the monsters lurking in the shadows. In online learning, the only thing you can really be certain of is the uncertainty. These are Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, so by definition they are unpredictable or non-forecastable. However, there are also some known unknowns that perhaps we should discuss. (MOOCs are good examples – they were known in 2011, but the likelihood that they would take off in 2012 in the way they did was not known, at least by most pundits.) Here are some possible bogeymen to lie awake worrying about:

the privatization of post-secondary education in the USA. Many states are in dire financial trouble. Will this result in some states privatizing their public post-secondary education systems? What price would Alabama State University fetch from a commercial buyer and how would that affect the state’s finances? If some states do decide on privatization, expect online learning to increase – indeed, online learning will likely increase in financially challenged states without privatization, because, rightly or wrongly, it will be seen as cheaper; also expect federal student financial aid to take a hit in the USA as Congress grapples with the deficit. a major Internet player (Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) jumps into the online learning market, perhaps in partnership with some elite universities, and takes a major share of the for-credit online market, because of lower costs, quality content, and accreditation from elite universities (but with a different category of degree from their on-campus programs) The US Congress backs publishers and shuts down all publicly funded open educational resources; copyright legislation is tightened on US-based Internet companies making it all but impossible to use educational resources over the Internet for free major power shortages/outages, due to bad weather/a surge in energy prices/political activists (pick your reason) makes online delivery increasingly unreliable during winter quantum computing arrives at a reasonable cost and completely changes the game.

In 2011, game designer Jane McGonigal published Reality is Broken, where she outlined four simple rules that define a game: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Both Jeopardy and The History of Biology fit this definition, but clearly there is a difference between games that teach the recall of facts and those that teach higher-order thinking skills.

esame Workshop, published a paper in 2011 called “Games for a Digital Age.” They distinguish between short-form games, “which provide tools for practice and focused concepts,” and long-form games, “which are focused on higher order thinking skills.” This is a useful first distinction teachers can use when evaluating games for use in the classroom.

A theme that comes up with teachers who use long-form video games is teaching empathy. “When I first started teaching natural disasters in Grade 7, there were case studies in the textbook, or videos,” says Mike Farley, a high-school teacher at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS). “When we invite students to play a simulation like Stop Disasters or Inside the Haiti Earthquake, they are more immersed; there’s more of an emotional learning.”

how do they learn best

Student Surveys: Using Student Voice to Improve Teaching and Learning