2008 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Key Trends

A portion of the work of the Advisory Board is devoted to reviewing key trends in the practice of teaching, learning, and creativity. The Australia-New Zealand Horizon Advisory Board identified and ranked those it considered most important for campuses in those regions to follow. Trends were identified through a careful analysis of interviews, articles, papers, and published research. The four trends below were determined to be those most likely to have a significant impact in education in Australia and New Zealand in the next five years. They are presented in priority order as ranked by the Advisory Board.

• Worldwide production of over 1 billion mobile phones per year is driving both innovation and adoption of ever more capable portable devices. These machines have the capacity to access the network, but they are not owned by the institution, a situation which is revealing an increasing disconnect between policy and reality. This movement away from desktop computers and labs is shifting the locus of control over access to resources from central authorities to users, with a resulting shift in the ways learning spaces are conceptualised and designed.
• There is an increasingly important set of influences from the workplace that are impacting how learning is designed and conducted. This is pushing a greater awareness of the value of hands-on, purpose-driven, authentic, and other active learning approaches. Increasingly the effectiveness of learning is being measured using concepts like engagement and time on task. The increased emphasis of the workplace on skills will fuel a greater focus on certifications, portfolios, and other ways that life experiences can be documented.
• The increasing connectedness of people around the globe has and continues to dramatically reduce the costs of collaboration. The decline in these costs is paralleled by tremendous growth in the sorts of free and/or very-low-cost tools available to bring people together in real time, to share assets and resources, and to communicate.
• As both computers and the network increase in connectedness and capability, the set of technologies available to educators grows ever richer. The ubiquity of these tools has lowered the cost of entry to use them, and is in turn opening up a range of new opportunities for e-learning and other forms of technology- mediated learning.