2009 Horizon Report Australia-New Zealand Edition

Critical Challenges

In addition to identifying key trends, the Advisory Board noted many challenges facing educational institutions in Australia and New Zealand. The four listed below are those selected as most likely to impact the practice of teaching, learning, and creative enquiry over the next five years. One challenge not listed below but present as an undercurrent in every dialog has been the effect of recent events in the global financial markets. While these events and their still-emerging ramifications are not elaborated upon here, they remain a backdrop on the stage as the trends and challenges noted by the board play out.

• Practices for evaluating student work will evolve in response to the changing nature of learning and student preferences for receiving feedback. As students continue to use new media and technology in research and class work — either because it is assigned or because they prefer it — effective methods of assessing non-traditional work must be developed. Additionally, new ways to conduct and deliver evaluations and grades must be adopted that take advantage of technology for dynamically assessing and reporting progress and for delivering feedback in ways that are meaningful and convenient for students.
• Ageing learning environments do not easily allow for embracing the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), or enable the sorts of learning support systems being promoted by modern theorists. Many classrooms are not equipped to support the number of students who bring laptops and require power and reliable Internet connectivity. Further, most of these spaces were designed for instructor- led lecture classes and are not conducive to collaborative group work. In a world where learning happens more and more in groups, particularly groups connected to resources via the Internet, traditional classrooms are no longer the best kind of space for every learning experience. Even the online spaces available to students often do not support their preferences or the recommendations of experts; many course and learning management systems that are used in schools are enterprise systems that too often do not reflect students’ desire for flexible, customisable tools.
• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy. To fully participate in the media-rich world around them, students must be able to understand basic content and media design, interpret media and advertising, and create multimedia messages that demonstrate visual fluency. These skills are not routinely taught and it is often wrongly assumed that because they are surrounded by media-rich messages, students simply absorb the ability to interpret and create them. There is an increasing realisation that these skills are as important as written, spoken, and information literacy, and they must be formally taught.
• There is a growing recognition that new technologies must be adopted and used as an everyday part of classroom activities, but effecting this change is difficult. The difficulty lies in creating new opportunities for learning in a well-established system. Teachers must be encouraged to master technological tools the same way any professional is expected to master his or her tools. To take advantage of new technologies, teachers, already pressed for time and resources, must be given the opportunity to incorporate professional development, training, and preparation into their own practice.

The trends and challenges noted here frame any discussion of the six technologies described below. They surround and infuse the environment in which these technologies exist and are put to use, and they inform the way we pursue the activities of teaching, learning, and creative enquiry. The Advisory Board acknowledges that understanding is only the first step toward incorporating any emerging technology into practice and recognises that the factors described here influence our decisions and actions on a daily basis.