The 2022 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report is one of those rare reports that is not solely based on the research of the writers, but instead incorporates the opinions of experts in the field who provide several rounds of votes on trends to narrow the responses down to arguably those that the group believes will be most important in the future.
This year’s expert panelists were asked to provide input across five broad categories: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political. The categories and their most important trends are listed below:
Social
- Hybrid and Online Learning
- Skills-Based Learning
- Remote Work
Technological
- Learning Analytics and Big Data
- [Re]Defining Instructional Modalities
- Cybersecurity
Economic
- Cost and Value of College Degrees
- Digital Economy
- Financial Deficits
Environmental
- Physical Campus Structures
- Increase in Sustainable Development Goals
- Planetary Health
Political
- Political Instability Driving Uncertainty in Higher Education
- Political Ideology Impacting Pedagogy
- Decrease in Public Funding
The experts were asked to identify the technologies and practices that they believe will have a significant impact on teaching and learning with an emphasis on those technologies that are newer. The following technologies and practices rose to the top of the curated list:
- AI for Learning Analytics
- AI for Learning Tools
- Hybrid Learning Spaces
- Mainstreaming Hybrid/Remote Learning Modes
- Microcredentialing
- Professional Development for Hybrid/Remote Teaching
After reviewing the trends section and the technologies and practices section, the report’s authors gathered and arranged the information into logical patterns that enabled them to envision and construct four scenarios for the future. These scenarios are:
- Growth: The pandemic has established the importance of having a digital ability to work and learn remotely. Normalizing hybrid and online learning models are well suited for personalized learning experiences and microcredentialing programs. The amount of digital learning data has exponentially increased providing the potential for savvy institutions utilizing AI technologies to improve learning.
- Constraint: Institutions are increasingly focusing their practices and decisions around a purposeful direction of improving the planet’s health. As a result, physical footprints are shrinking as many are choosing to invest in online capabilities to minimize resource consumption and waste.
- Collapse: Political divisions around the world have intensified. Leaders of higher education institutions are often forced to align with one political affiliation or another. These political alliances have implications for institutions’ business and programmatic decision-making as well as for restrictions on curriculum and pedagogy. In some areas of the world, physical safety and cybersecurity concerns drive institutional investments in surveillance technologies and systems.
- Transformation: Higher education’s form and function have been reimagined to better fit the demands of the workforce of the future. Traditional four-year and graduate school models of issuing degrees have been abandoned in favor of more practical, customizable, and lifelong models of cross-cutting skills attainment and credentialing.
Finally, seven of the expert panelists were asked to reflect on the implications of these trends for their institutions by writing individual essays included in the report. Essayists represented six institutions from around the world as well as one corporation, and the report’s authors maintain that the diversity of the essayists shows the similarities across higher education around the world.
This year’s 57-page report is highly informative and contains useful examples of institutions and corporations utilizing many of the technologies mentioned. These examples are so specific that I will likely utilize them from time-to-time when I write about a particular technology and how it is being utilized in higher ed. The authors note that most of the trends were included in last year’s report but that the world’s emergence from the pandemic is providing more evidence of the permanence of some of the forecasted trends.
For leaders of higher education institutions interested in where and how to invest in technologies, this report is very useful. For ed tech corporations selling to higher education institutions, I would provide a cautionary note. Most of the panelists are in the IT field or learning technology field. Their enthusiasm for the capabilities of technology may not translate to a speedy implementation at their institutions. Nonetheless, the directional focus appears to be solidly supported by the methodology employed to build consensus amongst the geographically and institutionally diversified experts.
