We previously noted one early entry in this category: the Destination Tracker. This online dashboard has been jointly produced by the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) with the explicit goal to “boost confidence and accelerate recovery of the tourism sector when borders reopen.”

Similarly, Australia’s goPassport provides a Live Risk Map that tracks COVID conditions in destinations around the world, including recent-term trends in COVID cases, government response, and vaccination rates. The Live Risk Map also provide a high-level summary of current travel rules, at both a country and state/provincial level, as well as any overall risk rating for each destination. The map relies on machine learning to compare and rate a variety of factors for each country to arrive at that overall rating, and is refreshed daily.

And Lufthansa has produced its own map-based dashboard which provides a more personalised summary for each travellers. The Lufthansa map is interactive and allows each traveller to see updated travel conditions and rules based on his/her passport, vaccination status, and intended destination.

The map then provides a fair bit of detail for each destination, including travel restrictions, quarantine requirements, travel documents, and direct links to any related travel apps that travellers are required to use.

There is an impressive amount of continuously refreshed information reflected in each of these online resources. Where each falls short, for international educators at least, is any specific provisions or requirements for international students. That caution aside, each will still be an important aid for students and student counsellors alike, and especially in a time when travel conditions and rules are changing so quickly in destinations around the world.

For additional background, please see:

• “UNWTO and IATA launch new dashboard for COVID travel updates“
• “Survey highlights student views on returning to study abroad“
• “World travel organisation calls for ‘harmonised travel and health protocols’ to spur recovery in 2021“

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Language travel remains a dynamic and growing market. Nearly 2.3 million students went abroad for language study in 2014, and many of these students did so as a foundation for further study overseas.

At the same time, many traditional sending markets are investing heavily in language teaching within their domestic education systems, meaning that additional students have an opportunity to develop greater proficiency without (or at least prior to) going abroad. Moreover, growing numbers of students are using online resources for language study, everything from free YouTube tutorials to MOOCs to paid online services offered by industry stalwarts such as Rosetta Stone. These trends are spurring the proliferation of language apps and leading some traditional language schools to enhance their offerings using online technologies.

Language schools are tapping into tech-enabled language learning in a variety of ways. Some schools offer online courses for inbound students or follow-up training for alumni. Others provide standalone courses online that may or may not be directly linked to face-to-face programmes abroad. And still others are finding entirely new business models built around technology-enabled language teaching.

These new models and experiments create a dynamic between traditional and emerging forms of delivering language learning that will play an important role in shaping demand for study abroad in the years ahead.

It’s in your pocket

With a reported 150 million users and an active user base of 30 million students per month, the language learning app  is the most downloaded education app for both Apple and Android devices. While education apps represent only about 5% of global iOS downloads, the category is a lively one, with year-over-year growth of 13% through the second quarter of 2016.

Even against that backdrop, the adoption rate for Duolingo is particularly impressive. Launched in 2012, the company has raised more than US$80 million in venture financing to date and claims not to have spent any of it on marketing. Rather, the company attributes its phenomenal growth curve to a highly engaging, gamified approach – all underpinned by clever machine learning technology – and to the tremendous word-of-mouth promotion the app has received.

Students can use Duolingo to study multiple languages, with the options varying according to the user’s native language. Most students on the service are using it to learn English, but English speakers can use it to study Spanish, French, and 14 additional European languages.

The industry-tracking service App Annie reports that the number of Duolingo users in markets such as Brazil and Ukraine is roughly equivalent to the population of students enrolled in high school or university foreign-language courses in each country.

App Annie’s vice-president of marketing communications, Fabien Pierre-Nicolas, said in a recent interview with  that “In some countries … we’re seeing that around 5% of the total smartphone population is using Duolingo. For the sake of comparison, about 10% of smartphone users in the US are playing Pokémon Go right now, and everyone is talking about it.”

School is still in

Although a service like Duolingo comes from the tech industry, there are many examples of interesting technology-enabled options being introduced by institutions or schools.

The UK-based online provider , for example, offers a fully online English for Academic Studies programme developed in collaboration with 25 higher education institutions in Australia, the UK, and seven other countries.

In Peru, the  has spun out an entirely separate sister school on the web. El Sol focuses mainly on teaching Spanish to international students who come to Peru for an immersion experience. But the online school –  – has developed into a distinct business over the past 10 years with its own brand, curriculum, teaching staff, and clientele. “It’s a different kind of instruction and we teach people differently than we do in the classroom,” says owner Alan La Rue. “Even so, I thought initially it would be the same client base, but in practice it hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, we’re attracting an older clientele [online] who live mostly in the United States.”

Perhaps one of the more innovative uses of technology by an established language school is from Vancouver-based Canadian College of English Language. Educators there began working on some initial computer-based course material in 2011, leading to a three-month pilot of CCEL’s first “paperless classroom.” The trial proved so popular that it expanded to a more wholesale adoption of technology-based learning throughout the school. It also led, in 2012, to the development of a standalone language curriculum and learning system called  that’s now being licensed to partner institutions in Mexico, Brazil, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Nearly 90,000 students now use Smrt English across 170 institutions, and the service has taken shape as a blended learning platform that allows students to combine in-class instruction with independent study outside of school hours. The combination has proven to be extremely popular and also highly effective: on average, Smrt English students progress through the English curriculum about 25% faster than those who pursue in-class studies alone. “Many students have prior experience with language learning and technology via apps or other online services,” says Smrt CMO Zach Taylor in explaining the appeal for students. “And fundamentally, students are heavily engaged with technology anyway.”

Building on that affinity for all things tech, the service is now poised for more international expansion. “We don’t want to change how teachers teach,” says Mr Taylor. “But we want to change the culture around English learning by engaging students and teachers in a much more effective way and at a much earlier age. Students should not be at a beginner level [of English] in high school or university. They should be ready for much bigger things.”

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The proposal is clear that seats for foreign students will not come at the expense of Indian applicants. Rather, the aim is to add thousands of new seats across all IITs and to have overseas students pay a significant differential fee in the range of Rs 400,000-500,000 per year (US$6,000-US$7,500), as opposed to the Rs 90,000 annual tuition (US$1,350) required of Indian students.

The initiative will initially focus on eight target markets in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Singapore, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The first five of these share membership with India in the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Government officials have indicated that students from the eight target markets may also be issued with a visa for their entire programme of study in India, rather than for a renewable one-year term as is generally the case.

The Minister’s 14 January memo also sets out that IIT Bombay will serve as a national coordinating centre for the recruitment effort. The institute’s director, Professor Devang Khakhar, has been tasked with preparing a more detailed plan of action with the expectation that implementation will begin later this year.

The proposal to the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) appears to have sprung directly from an October 2015 meeting of the IIT Council in Mumbai. The Economic Times reports that at the October meeting of the IIT governing body, “It was decided that ‘a system for admitting foreign students would be put in place, with preference being given to students from SAARC and African countries.’ Earlier, in September, the Council of IITs in its 41st meeting had agreed that up to a fifth of…postgraduate students in IITs may be international students who will be provided admission on a supernumerary basis.”

Admissions for foreign applicants are expected to be opened for the 2017 academic year, but outreach work will begin in August 2016. Looking ahead to 2017, the Indian government intends that IIT entrance examinations will also be offered in selected foreign markets, with test administration to be coordinated by the IITs with the support of Indian diplomatic missions abroad.

All candidates hoping to study at an IIT must first undertake either the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), for undergraduate students, or the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) for master’s and PhD applicants. Both are widely viewed as among the toughest standardised admissions tests in the world. As a senior HRD official remarked to news agency PTI, “The entrance tests to the IITs abroad have been held till now only to admit Indian nationals. This is for the first time that it has been planned to admit foreign students through tests held abroad. It is aimed that the plan would be operationalised from the JEE/GATE exams to be conducted in 2017.”

The big why

The Indian government is motivated in part by a desire to boost the international rankings of its premier engineering schools, and internationalisation, including the proportion of international students, is an important parameter in ranking schemes. “Despite having the best talents from India and a huge spending, none of the IITs find mention among the top 200 global institutes. This has been a cause of concern not only for the IITs but also for the Ministry of Human Resource Development,” adds the newspaper . “[The drive to recruit more foreign students] would also help strengthen India’s soft power globally, especially among neighbours,” adds a professor from IIT Delhi.

Speaking at an Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) event last week in Delhi, Minister Irani declared that India is an “affordable destination for high-quality education.” She added, “Cultural diplomacy has been at the forefront of our engagement through the [Ministry of External Affairs], the Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi now has given it an added push through education diplomacy. The challenge before the country’s educational institutions is whether the engagement with foreign students is to be limited only on the basis of scholarships or can they be invited because of excellence in various fields.”

State of play

Starting from a small base, Indian has seen some steady gains in its foreign enrolment over the past several years. It hosts about 35,000 students today, more than three-quarters of which are enrolled in undergraduate programmes.

Many come from other SAARC countries, notably Nepal – which accounts for just over 20% of foreign enrolment in India – Bhutan, and Afghanistan.

As these early patterns illustrate, India could well expect to draw increased numbers from neighbouring South Asian markets, or even further afield. In the context of current enrolment levels, the 10,000 additional seats anticipated under the emerging IIT recruitment drive will represent a nearly 30% increase in international enrolment alone.

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But is a photo sharing app ed tech? And should we include that new classroom management software? Leaving aside the nuances in some of these deal counts, a few things are quite clear at the midpoint of the year.

Deal activity is surging

First, investment in education technology is on the rise and has reached a new high. Ambient Insight counts US$2.5 billion in deals over the first half of the year, a figure that is already greater than Ambient’s total for all of 2014. The Ambient tally highlights 262 deals that were done between January and June 2015, reflecting a 66% increase over the total for the first half of 2014.

A more conservative count from edSurge finds a worldwide total of 161 investments for the year-to-date (YTD) June 2015 with a combined value of US$1.6 billion. Sector investment, merger, and acquisitions activity slowed gradually over 2013 and 2014, but has certainly spiked again in 2015, as the following chart reflects.

A recent market brief from investment banking firm Berkery Noyes takes a broader view and points out that private investment activity is on the rise across education sectors. “If you look at the activity in terms of the volume of transactions, we’re at the highest level in the last two and a half years,” says Peter Yoon, the firm’s managing director.

The Berkery Noyes tally reports a 9% increase in deals in the first half of 2015, as compared to the last six months of 2014. Deal values, however, rose even more for a 29% increase and a total of US$6.11 in education sector investments YTD June 2015. Even so, and as the following chart reflects, ed tech accounts for a significant share of that overall growth in investment, merger, and acquisition activity for the first half of 2015.

Transactions by market segment per half year, from first half 2013 to first half 2015. Source: Berkery Noyes

While the larger deals – – tend to attract the lion’s share of attention, Ambient points out that just over half of all 2015 investments in the sector are for US$10 million or less.

Many observers agree that this growing investment in ed tech is being driven by strengthened public funding in some jurisdictions, but also by new business models and the increasing adoption of technology at all levels of education.

Perhaps most tellingly, increased investment in the sector also says something about investor belief in where the market (and education more broadly) is going next. “These investor dollars are a road map for where you’re going to see higher education go in the future,” says Trace Urdan, an independent analyst in the sector.

“Technology is a key enabler for success,” adds a September 2014 report from BMO Capital Markets. “In certain sectors, particularly postsecondary, an online delivery model has become more accepted and fewer quality-related questions are being asked… Those traditional education providers that smartly incorporate technology in their existing offerings should have a competitive advantage.”

China is becoming a bigger player

While the US continues to account for a fair bit of investment activity in the sector, China has emerged as both an important host and source of significant investments this year.

Ambient reports: “In the first half of 2015, US$798.6 million went to 20 learning technology companies operating in China; this was 32% of the total investment that went to all companies combined around the globe. This is extraordinary considering that the total investment made to Chinese learning technology companies for the entire year of 2014 was US$634.4 million, which was 26% of all global investments.”

Investment in the sector in China is especially concentrated in mobile learning, with “investors particularly attracted to companies that develop mobile English language learning apps and mobile edugames for young children.”

The report notes India and Brazil as two other markets that have attracted greater investor interest for ed tech in 2015. While both remain far below the investment levels seen in China this year, both have also seen significant growth in deal volumes and values through June 2015.

Consumer-facing tech wins

In contrast to investment patterns of several years ago, the latest tallies reflect that the bulk of new money in the sector is going to support consumer-facing education technologies – that is, products or services marketed directly to consumers.

This is an important indicator of the growing mainstream adoption of learning technologies. Of particular interest to international educators, Ambient reports that online language learning is the top selling learning product type in every consumer segment across the globe.

Consumer-facing investments for the first half of 2015 totalled US$1.4 billion, and, in keeping with the theme for this year, already surpassed the US$984 million in financing for consumer ed tech in all of 2014.

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Evaluation & Accreditation of Quality in Language Services () is a leading international provider of monitoring services in the language education sector, with over 125 accredited members in 30 countries. And so it is perhaps not surprising that both sources and strategies for innovation were the subject of considerable discussion at the Eaquals International Conference in Malaga, Spain last week.

What we talk about when we talk about tech

The conference gave particular consideration to the role of technology in language learning, and the potential of technology as a source of innovation for schools. We have reported previously on the growing consumer demand for technology-enabled language learning – a market that is forecast to double its revenues to US$1.6 billion by 2018.

Digital language learning is a broad category that includes:

• Online learning, whether self-paced or collaborative;
• Digital learning resources (e.g., e-textbooks, e-gradebooks, interactive media);
• Mobile learning apps, including educational games and other mobile services.

The ways in which language schools can apply any of these technologies are equally broad. For example, a school may choose to offer online learning, whether as a stand-alone programme for remote students, as a complement to classroom instruction for students on site, or a tool to use before or after studying abroad.

Additionally, a school may choose to provide mobile devices or mobile apps to allow students greater opportunity for independent study outside of class time. Teachers may bring technology into the classroom in the form of new teaching tools, such as interactive whiteboards or computer-based assessments, and more.

The benefits of e-learning

Aside from its strategic significance to the school, technology holds great promise for students as well. It can support more independent and personalised learning, and, in the best case, allow students to accomplish more and progress faster in their studies.

The rationale for adopting technology at a classroom or school level is therefore fairly straightforward:

• It responds to consumer demand;
• Improves student performance;
• Extends what teachers can accomplish in the classroom;
• Conveys a certain sophistication and cutting-edge flair for the school’s language programmes.

In short: it boosts the competitive edge of the language centre, helps to differentiate its programmes and services, and, in so doing, ultimately helps to attract and retain more students.

This competitive advantage is being further enabled by various standards for the use of technology in schools, including accreditation models for online learning programmes, that are beginning to grow up around the burgeoning consumer demand for digital language learning.

Eaquals, for example, regularly reviews and updates their accreditation scheme to ensure it remains fit for purpose, and they have recently developed a new set of quality indicators for online language programmes in response to the increasing use of learning technologies in language schools.

We caught up with Sarah Aitken, Eaquals Executive Director, who explained, “As the use of IT becomes mainstream in language education, Eaquals accreditation will be able to continue to apply a principled approach to evaluating and supporting quality across our member centres. Eaquals Quality Standards are already designed to be relevant in all educational contexts and the ability to accredit new types of language teaching institutions will support our growth strategy as well as keep Eaquals at the forefront of innovation in our sector.”

Eaquals members have been increasingly engaged with issues raised by the use of handheld IT devices in language learning and are grappling with issues such as how to direct resources to e-learning and how the technology will be used both in and out of the classroom. Eaquals wants to ensure that their accreditation scheme covers all academic activities within their current member language centres, focusing on the quality of course delivery and the learner experience.

The newly updated Eaquals Quality Standards apply to online course delivery models as well as “traditional” models. A working group is refining practical inspection procedures and producing guidance documents for applicants and inspectors, and a full launch of the scheme is expected later later this year.

Not so fast

Such quality measures to recognise, develop, and reward good practice in online learning will prove vital as the industry evolves, particularly as educators face challenges when implementing e-learning.

seminar at the Eaquals conference looked at the other side of the potential in e-learning. A celebrated author and associate professor in the Master of Arts in TESOL at The New School in New York, Mr Thornbury outlined the common challenges that schools encounter when adopting new technologies. These include the following:

• Variability in hardware and software, including access to devices as well as the Internet, used by both teachers and students;
• Administrative challenges with respect to students forgetting to bring devices, losing passwords, requiring tech support, etc.;
• Mixed levels of enthusiasm and expectations from stakeholders, management, and teachers;
• Variable motivation of teachers to adopt new tools or processes in the classroom;
• Lack of training for teachers in the use of technology in their teaching;
• Issues around motivating learners (e.g., to follow a self-paced online lesson or adopt a new mobile app);
• Extremely competitive and congested marketplace, with adoptions and teaching practices varying considerably from school to school or even class to class.

Other speakers argued that schools tend to set their expectations too high in terms of what technology can accomplish. Then, when things don’t go as planned, there is a tendency to think that “digital doesn’t work” and technology becomes a scapegoat for other problems a school may have.

Ultimately, the key to more reasonable expectations and an effective tech adoption, say experts, is to have a plan.

Strategy first

In other words, a clear digital strategy is essential when integrating technology into learning. You must consider:

• How will expanded adoption of learning technology fit into your strategic plan?
• What material will be online as opposed to in books and/or delivered face to face?
• Will you use online services, mobile devices, or other technology tools?
• How will you promote any new technology adoptions or features in your marketing materials?
• Will you use material from a publisher or will you create your own e-library? (The former providing convenience and up-to-date coursework, the latter distinguishing you from the competition, boosting your profile, and perhaps offering you a revenue stream should you decide to license it.)

These are just some of the key questions to be asked, and underlying them all is a goal of purposeful innovation – that is, innovation with sound business goals that has a chance to create or reinforce some competitive advantage. As Michael Carrier, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Cambridge English, put it at the conference, “Innovation must be connected to the value proposition. It must be connected to the value for the customer and for the business in terms of revenue generation.”

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The report is produced by the New Media Consortium (NMC), a not-for-profit consortium of hundreds of colleges, universities, museums and companies, and in collaboration with EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (), a network of 1,800 institutions and more than 300 corporations serving higher education IT.

The report’s findings come from the deliberations of an international panel of education and technology experts from 13 countries and six continents. The panel reached consensus on six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in education technology “likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in education around the globe.”

The timing aspect is an interesting feature of the Horizons model, and it lends extra weight and relevance to the consensus findings of the panel. In terms of key trends, the panel identified two “fast” trends that will drive change in the next one to two years, two more “mid-range” trends that will drive change in the next three to five years, and two “long-range” trends that will have an impact in five years or more.

Trend #1: Growing ubiquity of social media
(predicted impact: the next one to two years)

“Social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and judge the quality of content and contributions,” say the Horizons authors. Certainly, the use of social media is exploding worldwide, across all demographics, and with profound implications for media consumption, communication, and knowledge exchange. As we have noted in our own coverage, social media also has an important impact in terms of driving user engagement online.

“For educational institutions, social media enables two-way dialogues between students, prospective students, educators, and the institution that are less formal than with other media,” notes the report. “As social networks continue to flourish, educators are using them as professional communities of practice, as learning communities, and as a platform to share interesting stories about topics students are studying in class.”

Horizons cites a couple of telling examples of social media in higher education, such as a partnership between Murdoch University and Duke University for a social mapping project through which students could share their observations about Northwestern Australia ecosystems, or the University of Hawaii’s Faculty Thought Leadership Series (), in which faculty discussions to re-envision higher education teaching were invigorated by YouTube broadcasts of the proceedings and real-time discussions on social media.

Please see our running coverage of social media trends and strategies for more on how these major platforms, both emerging and established, are impacting student recruitment practices.

Trend #2: Integration of online, hybrid, and collaborative learning
(predicted impact: the next one to two years)

Horizons finds that, “An increasing number of universities are incorporating online environments into courses of all kinds, which is making the content more dynamic, flexible, and accessible to a larger number of students. These hybrid-learning settings are engaging students in creative learning activities that often demand more peer-to-peer collaboration than traditional courses.”

The natural shift towards expanded online learning opportunities – “natural” because of the underlying shift in student behaviour to online – accounts in part for the considerable speculation about the impact of emerging MOOC platforms in recent years.

It remains to be seen what impact a greater emphasis on online learning will have on international education, but we already find ready examples of how online programmes are being used by international students to sample programmes abroad, or to complete entire programmes delivered by foreign providers, and also to provide for an expanded range of study and practice opportunities for language learning.

Trend #3: Data-driven learning and assessment
(predicted impact: the next three to five years)

“The emerging science of learning analytics, discussed in more detail later in this report, is providing the statistical and data mining tools to recognise challenges early, improve student outcomes, and personalise the learning experience,” says the report.

Among several other examples introduced in Horizons, NMC points to an at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK.

As we also noted late last year, “big data” analysis has broad implications in international education, both for programme delivery and student success but also for recruitment, retention, and admissions.

Trend #4: Shift from students as consumers to students as creators
(predicted impact: the next three to five years)

“A shift is taking place in the focus of pedagogical practice on university campuses all over the world as students across a wide variety of disciplines are learning by making and creating rather than from the simple consumption of content,” says the Horizons report. “Creativity, as illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities, and crowdfunded projects in the past couple years, is increasingly the means for active, hands-on learning.”

This trend is of course technology-enabled but it reflects an enduring interest on the part of students to apply learning, to learn by doing, and to create something meaningful in the process.

The report again provides a number of real-world examples as to how this trend is playing out in higher education today, including several from the University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship: “MHacks was a 36-hour nonstop hackathon. was a competition where students created social innovation projects centered around the topics of health, poverty, environment, or education. As part of this, student business developers set up a storefront in the Student Union to sell their products directly to other students. 1000 Pitches was a contest where students created short video business pitches to solicit their ideas.”

As these examples illustrate, institutions may find compelling new opportunities for recruitment and competitive positioning through the introduction of new “learning by doing” opportunities that allow students to build portfolios, acquire real-world experience, pursue entrepreneurial interests, and connect with prospective employers.

Trend #5: Agile approaches to change
(predicted impact: five or more years)

“Institutions are increasingly experimenting with progressive approaches to teaching and learning that mimic technology startups,” says the report, and there appear to be two threads at work with respect to this trend.

First, it reflects an important, longer-term strategic issue for institutions that we have also looked at previously: the need to refine or even reinvent higher education business models. Second, it expands on the previous “student as creator” trend in pointing to a need for greater connections to real-world learning in higher education. In both respects, this trend bears not only on the structure and operations of higher education institutions but also on the important role that higher education plays in addressing significant labour market gaps or other structural economic or social challenges.

Horizons cites an October 2013 U.S. Department of Commerce report (“”) that highlights ways in which American universities are encouraging entrepreneurship. “With the demand from employers for graduates to have real world experience before entering the workforce, more institutions are structuring learning activities that forge these opportunities early. Rice University, for example, recently raised over one million dollars to launch a business planning competition where students presented strategies to start their own companies; the money was also used to provide funding for the winning plans to get off the ground. Additionally, more institutions are developing mentorship programs for students to nurture this spirit of innovation.”

Trend #6: Evolution of online learning
(predicted impact: five or more years)

The report adopts a longer view for its sixth and final trend, and leaves some room for an expansion of the observations in trend #2 above (integration of online learning). “Over the past several years, there has been a shift in the perception of online learning to the point where it is seen as a viable alternative to some forms of face-to-face learning,” it says.

“The discussions among members of the 2014 Higher Education Expert Panel indicate that the advent of voice and video tools is not only increasing the number of interactive activities between online instructors and students, but also greatly improving their quality.”

The time horizon indicated here is important, as it is for all trends identified throughout the report, and it sets up a challenge for traditional programme models going forward to adapt and expand their current offerings for a future that anticipates a greater role for online learning.

Please see the complete 2014 NMC Horizons Report for additional background, examples, and further reading on each of the six trends.

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What do learners want?

By now it’s no secret that students are demanding more technology in education, and another new study called “The Future of Education” – conducted by Internships.com and the research firm Millennial Branding – further backs this belief: 50% of students feel a physical classroom is unnecessary for learning, 53% trust in the reputability of online colleges, and 39% expect education to be more virtual in the future.

Other findings from the report show that:

• 84% of students use a computer to study.
• 19% use an iPhone and tablet device to study.
• 69% would participate in an online internship if they were able to.
• 43% believe online education will provide them with courses of the same or higher quality than traditional colleges.

Instructors out of sync

These findings highlight modern learners’ embrace of new technology; however, university instructors are not quite in sync with students.

Concerns about the quality or effectiveness of online classes are well documented. by Inside Higher Ed and Babson Survey Research Group showed that two-thirds of instructors believe students learn less online than in traditional classroom settings.

Interestingly, 78% of students responding to the aforementioned Millennial Branding/Internships.com survey still believe that it’s easier to learn in a traditional classroom than online.

In other words, they disagree that the quality of the instruction is worse, but concede that self-directed learning involves added difficulties.

But what supporters of online classes greatly value is their flexibility and lower cost. .

Online learning offers the opportunity to self-customise schooling in such a way as to balance work, class, social and family commitments, and be able to learn at the most comfortable pace, rather than one dictated by a syllabus and timetable. The questions prospective students will increasingly ask about their options for customised learning are ones educators, institutions, and agents must be able to answer.

Top trends moving forward

The “NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition” specifies six emerging education trends:

• MOOCs;
• Tablet computers;
• Gamification of curriculum;
• Use of learning analytics;
• 3D printing;
• Wearable technology.

The latter two items are far horizon trends that don’t impact on recruitment or student mobility yet, and the use of learning analytics is likewise best left for another day. But the first three items have already made a measurable impact on the educational landscape and in student expectations.

Meanwhile lists these five trends:

• Social media collaboration;
• Cloud computing technology;
• Open source software products;
• eBook readers and notebooks;
• Educative gaming.

Many other analysts are in broad agreement about these items, and we see overlap in the two lists, as well as overlap between the technologies themselves.

Cloud computing and MOOCs

Cloud computing and MOOCs are linked. Cloud computing, in which data is stored online rather than in local computers, allows users anywhere in the world to share information via interfaces like GoogleDrive, SkyDrive, and Dropbox. MOOCs also operate on a cloud principle.

For more on the subject of MOOCs, see these previous articles: “MOOC development continues to pick up speed” and “Is technology the key change agent in higher education?“.

Many questions still surround MOOCs, but a key element driving their production is consumer demand. A new technology that serves nobody is a technology that can’t survive. Here again, customisation is the key. , whether they be financial, geographical, temporal, or all three.

Tablet technology

Tablets and eBook readers are a firmly established trend that is growing stronger. In many countries they are becoming a standard household appliance.

In Great Britain, for instance, tablet shipments in the first quarter of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012. And on the other side of the pond, 34% of American adults aged 18 and older own a tablet computer – almost twice as many as a year ago.

As .eduGuru notes, while students are depending more on eBook readers and tablet computers, many educational institutions are meeting them halfway by moving toward a paperless model.

These moves are often driven by economic and environmental concerns, but educators also understand that these devices are intrinsic to the learning process of millennials, and that their increasing affordability means that more students will buy them. In 2013, tablet sales are projected to surpass those of the ubiquitous laptop computer.

Open source material

Open source software means, basically, free to use. , and are examples of open source educational software. These and other products are specifically known as learning management systems, or LMS. Using these products, both students and instructors can create presentations and other useful content via customisable code.

Open source as a trend encompasses open source textbooks, which are growing in popularity due to high textbook costs for both students and institutions. In the US, the state of California has invested US $5 million to develop open source college textbooks, and states like Illinois and Virginia are considering similar moves.

There are copyright issues and other obstacles, but soon, instructors might routinely download several open source textbooks, mix and match relevant chapters, embed video files containing demonstrations or examples, save the result and make it available for students to download to their tablet computers.

Open source textbooks are being predicted by some analysts to replace in the next ten years, effectively eradicating billions of dollars in profits for those publishers. Already, there are many websites where open source textbooks are available, including:

• Collegeopentextbooks.org
• MERLOT

Gaming and learning

Gamification is one of the hottest trends in e-learning and online marketing. The structure of gamified learning varies, but the idea is to use game mechanics to spur students to greater levels of participation. Proponents suggest that through gamification, students retain what they learn at a higher rate than with traditional approaches.

And in looking at how to appeal to the millenial generation, we know that youth are looking for both indulgence and adrenaline-provoking thrills, which is what makes gamification so appealing and likely explains the success of contests in so many company’s marketing plans.

MOOC provider edX uses gaming as key component of its learning process, and the company has partnered with respected universities like the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Texas, Wellesley College, and Georgetown University. Such partnerships have the potential to bring gamified learning into the collegiate mainstream.

The overarching trend of social media

Customisation necessarily involves empowerment, and empowerment is where social media come in. The use of social media technologies remains , with an astounding 8 zettabytes (or 8 trillion gigabytes) of data expected to be shared online by 2015.

No surprise then that last year, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ all added record numbers of active global users.

Photo sharing sites continue to show explosive growth, as well. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, has gone from 22 million to nearly 100 million.

Regional interfaces such as Vkontakte (133 million users, concentrated in Russia and Ukraine) and Badoo (147 million users, concentrated in Spain and Latin America), are also important players on the scene.

And in addition to these, there are numerous websites that have made content sharing their basic model, focusing on information about universities, university courses, university communities, and professors. For instance, College Prowler claims to host close to one million discussions at 8,100 campus communities. Other websites include , , and .

The popularity of these platforms offers educators and agents opportunities to reach current and prospective students, however, the lighting quick spread of peer opinions means that deficiencies are difficult to hide.

The constantly communicating online community has the power to lay bare every aspect of an educational institution or service, and this is true even for schools with no social media presence.

Just as importantly, new norms are continually being established on social media sites. A prospective student’s desire for customisable education is confirmed by thousands of online peers, and a ripple soon becomes a tidal wave. With the cost of education rising, today’s students feel entitled to learn on their own terms – i.e., cost customised, place customised, and time customised. The above trends and others on the horizon are merely the first attempts to satisfy those demands.

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Today, we follow up on these observations by looking at the popularity of MOOCs and other types of distributed learning as major drivers of technological change in education.

Because of the MOOC’s potential to open higher education to hundreds of millions of people, numerous private companies are focused on improving the quality, scalability, and personalisation of online delivery platforms, and it’s in this area that technological innovation is occurring in leaps and bounds.

More broadly, a new report from Universities UK concludes that higher education models will continue to evolve due to several technology factors:

• Improved access to high speed broadband
• Changing social attitudes of students and staff in relation to the use and adaptation of technology
• Rapid innovation in online technology, including mobile devices and cloud computing
• Bottom-up adoption of externally-developed technologies into the activities of an institution by students and lecturers

Recent developments in education technology are occuring against a backdrop of rising higher education costs and increased student demands for value, convenience, and access to technology. What do these countervailing trends mean for traditional education models and established recruitment pathways and how might they shape the future of higher education?

Big investments in new distributed learning systems

To begin, web giant Google has taken what its officials call an “experimental first step” into online education, releasing open-source software called in the hope that universities will use it to deliver free online courses. The company aims to partner with high profile schools such as MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard to offer courses, and cites numerous universities that have expressed interest in the platform.

Google’s director of research Peter Norvig has specifically mentioned Stanford University as a potential partner, telling The Chronicle of Higher Education last month: “We’re close with Stanford – Coursera and Udacity both came out of Stanford. They’re working on their own open-source project, and they’re also interested in working with us.”

In more news out of Stanford, September saw the university introduce an online course delivery platform called Class2Go, which is open-source, nonprofit, portable, and designed for research as well as teaching. Stanford is offering 16 free online courses for fall 2012, and two of them will be delivered via Class2Go. Its non-proprietary model has been described as “non-sticky,” meaning that professors bring their own material to the platform and retain it when they leave. Among course delivery platforms, this is unique.

Wherever there’s new software technology developing, Apple is guaranteed to be lurking. The computing giant’s iTunes U Course Manager, which was unveiled in January, allows instructors to create material that can be downloaded and synced to the iTunes U iPad application, or if they prefer, they can access content from universities and other educational institutions around the world for use in a classroom setting.

The platform only works on iOS devices, most notably the iPad, yet even with this and other technical restrictions, iTunes U Course Manager has proved extremely popular. note, however, that Apple’s business model requires educators to rely on only one means of distribution, and to push their students to use Apple devices. The marketing strategy is clear; whether it’s good in the long run for education is somewhat less clear.

Meanwhile in Canada, ed-tech firm has developed a cloud-based learning platform that has been adopted within large organisations like the Ontario Ministry of Education, the New York City Department of Education, and universities in Canada, Singapore, and China.

And now, the company has major backing. It recently the acceptance from US-based OMERS Ventures of US$80 million in funding – an astonishing figure that may hint at the level of profit venture capitalists anticipate reaping in the ed-tech field.

Another example is the much talked about Coursera, which partners with universities ranging from Vanderbilt to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and has enrolled more than one million students from nearly 200 countries into its online courses. It also secured a further US$16 million in venture capital in April 2012.

And where there’s Coursera, there’s – the online venture started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recent news on their front is that The University of Texas system plans to put up US$5 million to join in, to help meet demand for low-cost college courses. “EdX is as well-funded as any startup and better funded than almost anyone else,” Steven Mintz, executive director of the Texas system’s Institute for Transformational Learning, said. “We aren’t without arms in this arms race.”

The trend seems clear – online delivery systems are a game-changing technology that has attracted considerable investment from outside the education arena, including from some of the world’s biggest technology giants.

What does this mean for traditional educational models?

Demand for online courses and the rush to serve the market has universities wondering if their traditional, centuries-old educational model is under threat. Furthermore, are showing that Interactive Learning Online (ILO) produces equivalent learning outcomes to traditional classroom teaching methods. But to date, distance learning remains a small subset of the higher education landscape. Only 5.3% of undergraduates currently use the method.

However, that percentage is set to grow as the use of technology and universities continue to raise fees. In the US, for example, college costs today are 559% of what they were in 1985, and fees are rising throughout as well. And as we reported in our previous article “Students demanding more technology in education,” universities in the UK are under increasing pressure to offer incoming students access to state-of-the-art technology because of the increased fees they are being asked to pay.

In the coming years, rapid technological development will require institutions, instructors, recruiters – virtually everyone in the education industry – to continually review their approaches and methods. Particularly as online education grows more popular, brick-and-mortar education providers will be increasingly called on to articulate what makes them unique and to focus on the student experience.

This view was strongly advanced at a recent education technology conference in Melbourne. Writing about the conference, The Age :

Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Young said institutes that wanted to retain a physical presence would need to focus increasingly on research and student residential experiences. Professor Young told the University of Melbourne conference that “high-volume education” would continue moving online and large lectures would begin to disappear.

An American delegate to the conference how his institution was already adapting to this emerging shift in the higher education landscape:

University of New England vice-chancellor Jim Barber told the conference that the traditional campus role was in decline. Hosting online learning would become one of the primary purposes for the bricks-and-mortar campus, he said. Under his vision, students would gather in online hubs studying with classmates from worldwide in the campus of the future, replacing packed lecture theatres and crowded tutorials.

These perspectives reflect the combined weight of a number of societal and technology factors that are acting on higher education today. That institutions are challenged to define and differentiate themselves and to deliver an outstanding student experience is hardly new.

Perhaps what is new in this equation is, on the one hand, the apparent pace of technology-fueled change and, on the other, the inter-play between innovation in education technology and the broader societal forces that are shaping the scale and nature of demand for education today.

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