EDUCAUSE is out today with the latest Horizon Report for Higher Education. This is, of course, a report that almost wasn’t as NMC, the original publisher of this project, abruptly closed its doors late last year. I had hoped that the whole thing would go away, but nothing ever dies in ed-tech. It just gets renamed – rebranded as “innovative” – and stays in circulation forever. Zombie ed-tech. Always on the horizon.
Sort of like “analytics technologies,” which according to this year’s Horizon Report are one year or less away from widespread adoption. It’s good to know that, 90-some-odd years since the SAT was first administered and 70 since ETS was founded, that someone is finally going to measure learning. (Adaptive technologies and learning analytics, incidentally, have both been “on the horizon” for the last seven years of the report, as you can see from the over-stuffed image below.)
You can find links to all the previous years' reports here. And you can look at the list of which technologies the Horizon Report has predicted are coming to higher ed since 2004 here.
The talk I gave at VCU in 2016 – “The Best Way to Predict the Future Is to Issue a Press Release” – is still one of my favorites. Your takeaway, now and then and always: do not worry about what this report says is “on the horizon.” I bet you in five, ten, twenty years time, folks will still be predicting that it’s all almost here.