Under the radar
The report isn’t necessarily the final word on education development and trends, and the NMC’s panelists frequently make tough choices in narrowing down their list. This year, Johnson said, trends such as redesigning learning spaces and an increasing focus on the measurement of learning were in the running up until the final vote. On the development side, cloud computing, learning analytics, and visual data analysis came close to making the cut.
Other efforts, even those that have appeared in past reports, were dropped altogether. Gaming, Johnson said, is a good representative example: “We retired games and gamification this year, as we do not see it entering the mainstream any time soon, despite the broad interest in the topic and the evidence of its efficacy,” he said. “It is just out of reach for most people, and the developments most experts thought were coming that might make it easier have not materialized yet. If that changes, it could come back.”
On a final note, something to watch going forward might be how teaching innovations are being scaled from the few to the many, which is mentioned in the report under the “Challenges” section as one that is “complex to even define, much less address.” Says Johnson, “There are a lot of good minds thinking about how to scale teaching innovations—we are watching places like India, Africa, and Latin America, where the need for innovation is far greater than in the U.S. We expect that the challenges faced in those countries is so great that we will need fresh new ideas to have any hope of meeting the needs there.”
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