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Design-based research requires interactive collaboration among researchers and practitioners

Integrating technology successfully in education is not so much a matter of choosing the right device, the right amount of time to spend with it, the best software or the right digital textbook. The key elements for success are the teachers, school leaders and other decision makers who have the vision, and the ability, to make the connection between students, computers and learning.I would encourage all educators to invest in their professional knowledge about how technology can improve their work practices.

written exams will have been replaced by assessment through multimedia portfolios of student work. These will show not only students’ current knowledge and competencies, but also their progression over time, and a range of equally important skills, such as their ability to work collaboratively, self-management of learning, and general communication skills. Assessment will be mainly on a continuous, on-going basis.

you are in a position to influence a different kind of vision

t will become increasingly difficult for institutions to protect student data and their privacy. This may turn out to be the biggest challenge for students, institutions, and government

Since content will be freely accessible, institutions’ reputation and branding will increasingly depend on the way they support learners. This will put much greater emphasis on instructors having good teaching skills as well as subject expertise.

They will have lost students to more prestigious universities and high status vocationally oriented institutions using online and flexible learning to boost their numbers.

I assume that individuals will enrol in this course to pursue a personal need/ambition

researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, who’ve been experimenting with computer-based learning for years, have found that when machine-guided learning is combined with traditional classroom instruction, students can learn material in half the time.

Top schools like Yale, MIT and Stanford have been making streaming videos and podcasts of their courses available online for years, but MOOCs go beyond this to offer a full-blown interactive experience.

Teens now approaching college age are members of the first generation to have grown up conducting a major part of their social lives online. They are prepared to engage with professors and students online in a way their predecessors weren’t

What is emerging is a global marketplace where courses from numerous universities are available on a single website. Students can pick and choose the best offerings from each school; the university simply uploads the content.

The era of online education presents universities with a conflict of interests—the goal of educating the public on one hand, and the goal of making money on the other.

One potential source of cost savings for lower-rung colleges would be to draw from open-source courses offered by elite universities. Community colleges, for instance, could effectively outsource many of their courses via MOOCs, becoming, in effect, partial downstream aggregators of others’ creations, more or less like newspapers have used wire services to make up for a decline in the number of reporters.

To borrow an analogy from the music industry, universities have previously sold education in an “album” package—the four-year bachelor’s degree in a certain major, usually coupled with a core curriculum. The trend for the future will be more compact, targeted educational certificates and credits, which students will be able to pick and choose from to create their own academic portfolios.

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate.

Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though “most popular” may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video, demand for instructors will decline. 

Large numbers of very intelligent and well-trained people may be freed up from teaching to do more of their own research and writing. A lot of top-notch research scientists and mathematicians are terrible teachers anyway.

Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise.

if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate. 

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The following are several specific examples of what the open standards and services must enable to make this new architecture for learning a reality: Digital content and applications must be easily, quickly (ideally, within a few minutes versus months), and seamlessly integrated into any platform that supports a set of vendor-neutral open standards and, importantly, are not trapped inside a single platform. User, course, and context information must be synchronized among selected applications so that neither the manual transfer of information nor multiple logins to different applications are required—thus making set-up and use of new software much easier for all concerned. Data that describes usage, activities, and outcomes must flow from learning content apps to the enterprise system of record, learning platforms, and analytics platforms. Systems, services, and tools must be virtualized and must increasingly move toward the elastic computing model that enables sharing scenarios across systems or other federations of users.Imagine what would happen if CIOs could safely add services and applications in a matter of days instead of months, if instructors could seamlessly combine these tools into their courses with one click, and if analytics data would begin to flow immediately thereafter. This new IT architecture would revolutionize the support for academic technology in the same way that the app movement has revolutionized what is available on mobile devices. A key difference with the new IT architecture, however, is that these educational apps are built using standards adopted and managed by the educational community and would be connected into the educational enterprise IT infrastructure.

The rise of the MOOC illustrates how important innovations often happen outside of established channels: by faculty who, interested in innovation, put together their own technology solutions outside their college or university. This should be a wake-up call for the higher education community to do better. Enterprise IT organizations need to enable such innovation, not stand in its way.