Today’s world moves at breakneck speed: if previously it would have taken a decade or two for a new trend in education to form and firmly take hold, today we sometimes see a new idea to appear, get adopted and abandoned all in a year or two. As a result, if you are interested in education, you can’t afford to overlook anything new – it may well be the Next Big Thing.
1. Rapid Evolution of Cloud Learning Management Systems (LMS)
A few years ago, LMSs were considered a dying breed; however, the emergence and quick development of cloud technologies breathed new life into them. Since then, the industry has constantly been on the rise, with cloud LMSs showing particularly astonishing results, growing more than 50% over the last year. And everything suggests that this tendency is going to continue.
2. Individualized Learning
Last year we saw several breakthroughs concerning collection and processing learning signals and data. If these new insights are used properly, in 2015 we will see new systems of personalized learning that will guide students through learning processes, adapt to their needs, help them avoid hidden reefs and reach better results.
3. Gamification
Education has been slowly but steadily moving in this direction for centuries, but only now we begin to clearly understand where it goes. According to statistics, learners generally remember only 10% of what they read and 20% of what they hear. The percentage of understanding and recollection jumps to 90% if they do something on their own. 2015 is likely to see an upsurge of using game mechanics in educational processes.
4. Blended and Online Learning
Google’s innovations like Google Drive and Google Classroom offer all the benefits, options and possibilities of expensive solutions without their costs. In 2015 more schools and higher educational institutions are likely to move on to them, which will mean greater availability of blended and online learning.
5. Corporate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
MOOCs have been around for some time and clearly showed their usefulness and convenience. So far they have been generally carried out by large universities; however, it seems that they’ve come under the spotlights of big business. Companies use them for training large numbers employees and applicants simultaneously, to disseminate information and knowledge within the company, to increase the group’s cohesion – and it has a lot more uses yet to be discovered.
6. Development of International Teaching Models
As the world gets increasingly more and more connected and interconnected, as schools and colleges around the world embrace the Internet and all its possibilities, the interest in developing models of education that would exceed borders and nations will inevitably grow. We’ve already seen that a lot of problems and issues encountered by educators are very similar no matter where they live, but the ways these issues are addressed are sometimes drastically different. And we certainly have a lot to learn from each other.
2015 already showed itself as a breakthrough year in many respects – and we are likely to see much more amazing developments further on.
