Trends in eLearning – Week 2 – 4 Feb 2014

This week we looked at the 2014 Horizon Report for Higher education and discussed MOOCs.

We looked at the 2014 report and discussed the key trends, challenges and time to adoption horizons. In the key trends it was clear to me that the fast trends will feed the mid-range trends and these will feed the long-range trends. For example social media challenges and integration of online, hybrid collaborative learning in the short term will fuel the shift from student as a consumer to student as a creator driven by big data; which in turn with agile approaches to change will see an evolution of online learning. It may be simplistic to to link them but I believe if the tends in the short term are met it will allow for the others.

Through the discussion an article by Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly, Saad Rizvi published in 2013 called An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead was recalled. In the post linked above I detail what I got from the article and I feel that yes third level institutions need to adapt to the new digital revolution, however it is not the first revolution the incumbents have had to deal with. The likes of Harvard and Oxford will always be around with others trying to emulate them, however only time will tell if niche university will stand the test.

MOOCs were also discussed with Kevin encouraging us to at least register for a course. I did and posted a comment on the discussion forum, replicated here, about my experience. I initially thought I could argue Alison provide MOOCs however it is clear there is no collaboration or networking involved and this makes them online courses rather than MOOCs.

Before next week I hope to look at a real MOOC, the 3 main providers of MOOC’s; Coursera, Udacity and edX.