NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition

What changes are on the horizon for universities and colleges around the world? Which trends, challenges, and developments in technology should higher education leaders prepare for today?

The NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition app brings to life the publication of its namesake, describing annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and analyze emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education.

Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. Use the app to drill down on specific content, wherever you are. Videos, visualizations, and links are embedded throughout to encourage you to dive deeper into pressing subjects like the personalization of learning, virtual reality, makerspaces, and robotics.

The report constitutes a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe.

Subjects in the app include:
• Advancing Cultures of Innovation
• Rethinking How Institutions Work
• Redesigning Learning Spaces
• Shift to Deeper Learning Approaches
• Growing Focus on Measuring Learning
• Increasing Use of Blended Learning Designs
• Blending Formal and Informal Learning
• Improving Digital Literacy
• Competing Models of Education
• Personalizing Learning
• Balancing Our Connected and Unconnected Lives
• Keeping Education Relevant
• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning
• Augmented and Virtual Reality
• Makerspaces
• Affective Computing
• Robotics

The report is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The report and accompanying app draws on the expertise of an international expert panel that first considers a broad set of important trends, challenges, and developments in educational technology, and then explores each of them in progressively more detail, reducing the set until the final listing of trends, challenges, and technology developments is selected. This process takes place online, where it is captured in the NMC Horizon Project wiki: http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org.