Photo: Courtesy my.opera.com
On reading the 2015 NMC Horizon study it seemed to me to be a sound assessment of the way technologies are heading in education but some areas seemed to lack ambition. This could obviously be down to the fact that education is well known to be slow on the uptake of new technologies, and the writers did not have the luxury of hindsight. One area which struck me was adaptive learning technologies which in the 2015 report it was pitched at 4 to 5 years and by the 2017 report is a year or less, these technologies in some way are already being used in education, in this way I think the report was being conservative, much like education itself. The internet of things was part of the 2015 report and again in 2017, on the same timeline moving from 4-5 years to 2-3 years. This one is very hard to gauge in my opinion as the term encompasses such a broad area who is to say when the uptake of these technologies really happen, some institutions would argue now Virginia Tech and The University of New South Wales for example, as mentioned in the report. I would imagine we will see a slow proliferation of these technologies making their way into institutions.
A couple of technologies that really interested me from the 2017 report was Artificial intelligence and next generation VLE's, these are both areas that have the capacity to have a profound effect on education and these are areas that could well work together. There are already applications coming to market that use AI capability one such application is seeing AI by Microsoft, this application uses the camera on a phone and describes the world around it. It is described as being designed for the low vision community. The adoption timeline for the next generation VLE's is 2-3 years and Artificial intelligence 4-5 years, if the desire is there I'm sure these timelines could be on the pessimistic side as the technologies are in place already, the need is definitely there in both areas especially as there is a general acceptance that students need a more personalised learning experience.
A technology that is missing from the reports in my opinion, and a technology that I have spoken about at some length is blockchain technology. This could have a profound effect on education and specifically the measurement of achievement and dissemination of research (a discussion of the form in which this may take place this can be found at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/10187). A site called steemit came on the scene in 2016 that also utilises blockchain technology and encourages users to post content and in return are given tokens, depending on the popularity of the piece, each post can be upvoted, so more votes, more rewards. With regards to measuring achievement a platform is being developed at appii.io that is utilising blockchain technology to securely keep records of achievement but also connect students and employers to maximise student's strengths and preferences with employer needs. I am surprised that blockchain technology has never made it into the report, the authors may have their reasons for this but in my opinion this technology will change the educational landscape and beyond in profound ways and I would place this at the mid term of 2-3 years.
Am I too optimistic?
