Seeing into the Future
College students will return to campuses the next two weeks and K12 teachers will be getting their classrooms set up for the new year (like a cresting wave, this occurs starting with primary teachers who are in & out all summer and ends a few days before day one with the high school teachers). September approaching usually puts me in a looking ahead mood and I figure that when I have no more hope that we can change things THIS year, it will be time to retire from education.
Two reports I encountered recently are referenced here.
Kineo, an eLearning firm from the U.K. and Intel collaborated on a project called The Future of E-learning in Universities to identify how 21st century universities will use e-learning to achieve their goals. You can download a PDF of the presentation.A few points close to my heart:
- The vendors of VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments - AKA an LMS to those of us on the U.S. side of the pond) are consolidating.
- Open source "vendors" are being increasingly utilized and threaten the commercial market on a global level.
- The 3 big players are the commercial product Blackboard, and the open source Moodle and Sakai.
- Open University's deployment of Moodle is the largest Moodle deployment in the world with an investment in excess of £4 million.
Here are some of those components:
- Self-Directed Learning
- Multi-age Grouping
- The Open Learning Environment
- Teacher or Professor as Facilitator and Learner
- Assessment Integrated with Learning
- Purposeful Work
- Apprenticeships for Developing Skills and Entrepreneurial Attitudes
- Technology as an Enabler of Self-Directed Learning and Self-Organization
- Lifelong Learning
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