EDUCAUSE Says Universities are in Technology Transition

The first contribution of the study is the identification of the drivers of change in high education including “rethinking how institutions work,” how degrees can be modified, how to advance “cultures of innovation,” how to measure learning and even what redesigned learning spaces should look like.

This is the wake-up call part of the report, the “key trends accelerating technology adoption in higher education.” The report then turns to the “solvable” challenges that threaten technology adoption, such as uneven “digital fluency” and the growing “demand for digital learning experience and instructional design expertise.” But it also looks at much tougher challenges like faculty and “rethinking the practice of teaching.”

How long? The report predicts “time-to-adoption” of the educational technologies, suggesting that mobile learning and analytics technologies are happening as we speak, that mixed reality and artificial intelligence are at the doorstep, but blockchain and virtual assistants are “four to five years” away. The report ends with a short list of “fail or scale” technologies, including adaptive learning, augmented and mixed reality, and gaming and gamification.

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