THE FUTURE- READY UNIVERSITY

From artificial intelligence to virtual reality, here are the

technologies to watch both today and in the coming years

to make sure your institution is prepared for the digital

transformation of higher education.

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Survey: Future of Ed Tech Is Bright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3In our latest Teaching with Technology Survey, nearly all faculty said they believe tech will play a positive role in education in the future.

Simplify, Sustain, Innovate: Themes for Top 10 IT Issues of 2020 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Security and privacy topped this year’s IT issues for higher education — yet again.

5 Myths of AI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6While AI may seem “clever,” it’s really just a set of software tools and math and logic techniques that can solve specific problems. Find out the other top myths that surrount this technology.

Grappling with IoT Growth on Campus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Universities share how the expanding Internet of Things is impacting their institutions, from the sheer volume of data to staffing issues and the overall potential for students.

Serving Students with AR and VR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Ambitious plans for AR/VR content discovery and access are a good fit for the university as it defines its role and services in the digital age.

Worldwide IT Spending Ticks Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Global spending on IT is expected to increase 1.1 percent this year compared to 2018, reaching a total of $3.79 trillion.

6 Key Ed Tech Developments on the Horizon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10From AR to AI to blockchain, here’s where things stand.

Table of Contents

“Technology is an indicator and revealer of the very fundamental changes that are needed in higher education, but not the short-cut answer to those critical questions.”

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Ninety-seven percent of faculty members who took our recent Teaching with Technology Survey reported a positive outlook on the future of technology in education. The survey asked higher education faculty at colleges and universities across the country about tech’s role in education, what technologies will become important in the future, what will fizzle out and more.

While faculty see a bright future for ed tech in general, they also acknowledged that certain technologies might be nearing their expiration date. When asked to predict which technolo-gies would be dead and gone in the next decade, the No. 1 response was desktop computers, followed by non-interactive projects and displays, document cameras/overhead projectors, printed textbooks and clickers.

We also asked faculty which technologies they wish they didn’t have to deal with. Tied for the top of that list were learn-ing management systems and non-interactive projectors and displays. Mobile phones and social media rounded out the top three slots, followed by lack of internet/wireless access, clickers, printers and smart watches (another tie), and e-mail.

A few other answers that caught our eye: Chegg.com (we have students using it to cheat); frequent, late-announced changes to technologies I must use every day; lack of training

for teachers; mail-order Ph.D. college presidents; out-of-date student computers; and proprietary publisher content.

Future of Ed Tech Is Bright, According to Faculty SurveyBY RHEA KELLEY

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In our latest Teaching with Technology Survey, nearly all faculty said they believe tech will play a positive role in education in the future.

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When we asked faculty what technologies they think will become important in education over the next decade, the lion’s share of responses pointed to virtual/augmented/mixed reality. In fact, that particular technology has topped the list three years in a row. Rounding out the top five this time around: mobile devices and wearables, 3d printing and scanning, artificial intel-ligence, and game-based learning.

Other less common yet interesting answers included acces-sibility, Amazon, face-to-face classes, haptic interfaces, mentor-ing/coaching, and nanotechnology.

Finally, we asked faculty for freeform comments on the state of technology in education. Their responses ran the gamut from concerns about accessibility and plagiarism to digital literacy and IT support, but one common theme was change.

“Technology is an indicator and revealer of the very funda-

mental changes that are needed in higher education, but not the short-cut answer to those critical questions,” noted one faculty member at a private nonprofit four-year institution in Oklahoma.

“Hurdle: Reduce the fear,” said another respondent from a public four-year institution in Arizona. “We know there are very smart people who have not engaged with these technologies because they don’t see the value or have a fear of change to the current model.”

And a faculty member at a public community college in Ohio reminded us, “Over the past three decades as an educational

technology professional I’ve observed that while technology changes constantly, human nature and human needs don’t. We sometimes forget that.”

Rhea Kelly is executive editor for Campus Technology. She can be reached at rkelly@1105media.com.

Security and privacy topped this year’s IT issues for higher edu-cation — yet again. Concerns about developing a risk-based security strategy that can stand up to the current and coming crop of computer threats was job number one for campus IT leaders in the latest Educause IT trends survey, shared with at-tendees at last week’s annual Educause conference. The topic of privacy — particularly, staying on top of privacy rights and protecting restricted data — came in number two on the list, up from the third position in 2019.

Each year this nonprofit community of IT leaders and pro-fessionals queries a group of campus IT and non-IT leaders, including CIOs, representatives from administration and faculty, to understand what their primary issues are. Then Educause members vote on the compilation to determine how to rank the issues.

Besides information security and privacy, four other issues made a repeat appearance from last year’s list:

• Sustainable funding, coming up with funding approach-

Simplify, Sustain, Innovate: Themes for Top 10 IT Issues of 2020 BY DIAN SCHAFFHAUSER

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es that can “maintain quality” while both ad-dressing greater demand for IT services and new IT needs even as funding gets tighter (listed at number three this year, up from number seven last year);

• Digital integrations, specifically mixing and matching applications and platforms in the areas of “interoperability, scalability and extensibility” along with “data integrity, security, standards and governance” (ranked fourth this year versus fifth in 2019);

• Affordability of higher ed, and more par-ticularly aligning IT work with institutional priorities (ranked in eighth place this year compared to number 10 last year); and

• The “integrative” CIO, becoming somebody with a place at the C-table (number 10 this year and number nine last year).

This year, four new (or newly positioned) issues surfaced in the ranking:

• The use of artificial intelligence for student retention and completion (number five), “to provide personal-ized, timely support”;

• Student-centric higher ed (number six), which has replaced “student success” and the “student-centered institution” for describing the creation of an “ecosys-tem” for supporting the complete student lifecycle;

• Improved enrollment (number seven), through the potent use of “technology, data and analytics,” with

the intent of creating “an inclusive and financially sustainable enrollment strategy” capable of serving “more and new learners” through personalization ef-forts; and

• Administrative simplification (number nine), the ap-plication of design, process improvement and system re-engineering efforts for eliminating or reducing needless work and improving user experiences.

Susan Grajek, vice president for Educause’s Communities and Research division, told attendees that the top issues shake out into three broad themes: simplify (such as with digital inte-grations and administrative simplification), sustain (including security, privacy, funding and affordability) and innovate (with student retention, student-centric higher ed and improvement of enrollment).

“The challenges facing higher education are unprecedented in scope and complexity. We can no longer operate in growth mode,” she said in a statement. “Institutions know they need to innovate to achieve a competitive advantage in today’s com-plex marketplace, and almost none of today’s innovation can happen without data and technology. The 2020 IT Issues reveal where the integrative CIO must simplify, sustain and innovate as higher education drives to digital transformation.”

In January the organization expects to publish its “Educause Review Special Report,” which will provide a deeper dive into the topics on this year’s top IT issues list.

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media’s education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at dian@dischaffhauser.com or on Twitter @schaffhauser.

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No, artificial intelligence can’t replace the human brain, and no, we’ll never really be able to make AI bias-free. Those are two of the 5 myths IT analyst and consulting firm Gartner tackled in its recent report, “Debunking Myths and Misconceptions About Artificial Intelligence.”

Myth 1: AI works like a human brainAccording to the report, while AI may seem “clever,” it’s really just a set of software tools and math and logic techniques that can solve specific problems. As an example, image recognition technology “is more accurate than most humans,” but the same coding can’t also address a math problem. As Research Vice President Alexander Linden, one of the authors, explained, “The rule with AI today is that it solves one task exceedingly well, but if the conditions of the task change only a bit, it fails.”

Myth 2: AI machines can learn on their ownCurrently, human intervention is needed to create an AI system, Gartner stated. Not only are “experienced human data scien-tists” needed to frame the problem, prepare the data, choose the right datasets and remove possible bias, they also have to “continually” update the software as new data and knowledge come to the forefront.

Myth 3: AI can be made bias-freeBecause of the human input needed for AI, it’s going to be “in-trinsically biased” one way or another, the report asserted. All we can do, Linden said, is “ensure diversity in the teams working

with the AI and have team members review each other’s work.” These two steps together “can significantly reduce selection and confirmation bias.

Myth 4: AI will only replace the “repetitive jobs,” not the ones requiring top degreesYes, AI’s capabilities in forming more accurate conclusions through “predictions, classifications and clustering” have al-lowed it to do away with routine tasks. But it can also help in the complex ones too. The report referred to the oft-quoted ex-ample of the use of imaging AI in radiology to identify diseases more quickly than highly-trained radiologists. But AI is also surfacing in financial services and insurance for wealth manage-ment and fraud detection. “Those capabilities don’t eliminate human involvement in those tasks but will rather have humans deal with unusual cases,” the report noted.

Myth 5: Not every company needs to map out its AI futureGartner said it believes that every company needs to under-stand how AI will affect its strategy and could be used to ad-dress its business problems. “Even if the current strategy is ‘no AI’, this should be a conscious decision based on research and consideration,” said Linden. And it should be revisited regularly, he added.

5 Myths of AI BY DIAN SCHAFFHAUSER

“The rule with AI today is that it solves one task exceedingly well, but if the conditions of the task change only a bit, it fails.”

Smart campus efforts take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) to gain efficiencies from automation and analytics, often starting with building systems and energy usage.

But as IoT efforts expand to other parts of the university, in-cluding student success, some universities are experiencing growing pains working across disciplines to gather and analyze so much data. For instance, a few years into a smart campus initiative called the Integrated Controls and Analytics Program, Stanford University (CA) is finding data quality and data man-agement are raising unforeseen challenges.

“Data management is the biggest obstacle we have right now,” said Gerry Hamilton, Stanford’s director of facilities energy management. “It all comes down to scalability and sustainabil-ity. We have found there is an exponential growth of effort that happens every time you deploy one more system.”

Getting one building control system to integrate with one cloud analytics application takes a lot of work, because several people with different subject-matter expertise have to be in-volved — including IT staffers who make connections to serv-ers and configure firewall rules, Hamilton explained. If you have

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100 buildings, all with slightly different control systems and multiple analytics applications, every time you do these in-tegrations, it adds to the layers of complexity. “From a labor standpoint, all this smart stuff we are putting in place to save us 80 percent on labor costs and make us 80 percent more efficient is doing just the opposite,” he said.

At Stanford, the energy metering systems are used for billing individual colleges and forecasting projections for the on-campus generating plant. In order to create verified billing data, the university has created its own data correc-tion tools for times when there are errors or gaps in the data flow or IP reliability issues. Yet one problem is that new stakeholders in the colleges are getting access to the raw data in one-minute timeframes. “What if someone tries to re-create that verified number from the raw data?” Hamil-ton asked. “They might say, ‘When I add up these instanta-neous values, I am not getting the same total you got.’ That is an issue. If we want to do reliable forecasting, we need to have a clean set of historical data. That means we have to disregard the bad data or come up with some way to auto-matically backfill with reasonable approximations.”

Hamilton said it all gets down to figuring out the busi-ness drivers. “Are we trying to be perfect for the sake of being perfect? There is some responsibility that comes with access to the data.”

From Tech-Infused Stadium to the ClassroomIoT efforts at Arizona State University have seen a similar pattern of “exponential growth.”

Last year, Campus Technology described how the insti-tution was outfitting its Sun Devil Stadium with sensors connected to the WiFi and cellular network, to collect tem-perature, humidity and noise data for use by facilities staff. Sensors can identify if a faucet anywhere in the stadium is left running after a football game is over, for example, to help cut water usage. ASU also worked on providing infor-mation through a mobile app on the availability of parking and wait time estimations for concession lines and rest-rooms.

The tech-infused stadium was created as a test bed for a larger investigation of and investment in IoT technologies at ASU. “One thing we explored was what beacons can and can’t do and what we can and can’t get from the network,” explained Chris Richardson, assistant vice president of IT development at ASU. “Some of that experimentation influ-enced our broader approach to using the network.”

The university has piloted the installation of location-tracking beacons in classrooms to understand trends in student attendance in big classes, where taking atten-

dance manually is impossible. “We have turned a few of our classrooms into a lab to study how to check students in and out without much intervention,” Richardson said. Because the provost’s office has expressed interested in attendance, ASU wanted to see if it could collect that data in a way that doesn’t expose students to unnecessary privacy risk.

“We decided to test out these beacons and have stu-dents’ phones pick up what is happening,” he said. ASU built an API to the student information system to pull in the record of the student, and with student and instructor permission they outfitted a few classes with the beacons. Interested students downloaded an engagement app on their phones. The app allows students to see if the room has a beacon. Once they click on it, any other time they come into the room, the beacon automatically picks them up. “Many students were interested in having their atten-dance in the palm of their hand, to know how they were engaged with classes,” Richardson said. “In fact, we found that some students would use the app to check in manually in classrooms that aren’t beacon-enabled.”

ASU didn’t share individual student data with the instruc-tors, but it is using the pilot to rethink how it communicates with students via mobile app. “We have partnerships with groups that run student success in our provost’s office, and we are building communication plans to engage students through push notifications,” Richardson said. “We will be able to better understand why they may take action or not and determine if that is something we might want to impact with adviser relationships,” he added. “It’s not easy to see the path from the stadium pilot to the classroom to now a broader mobile app strategy, but they all build on each other.”

ASU is not alone in trying to apply IoT to student success. A University of Arizona professor is using data collected when students swipe their ID cards on campus to see if it reveals patterns about student routines that could be used to predict their likelihood of returning to campus after their freshman year.

A news story on the UA website noted that Sudha Ram, a professor of management information systems, gathered and analyzed data on freshman student ID card usage over a three-year period. She then used that data to create large networks mapping which students interacted with one an-other and how often.

“Considered together with demographic information and other predictive measures of freshman retention, an analysis of students’ social interactions and routines was able to accurately predict 85 to 90 percent of the freshmen who would not return for a second year at the

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UA,” the story noted, “with those having less-established rou-tines and fewer social interactions most at-risk for leaving.”

Impact on StaffRegardless of whether the goal is impacting student life or just building or parking lot efficiency, deployment of IoT systems requires building new relationships and new governance struc-tures. Chuck Benson, assistant director for IT in Facilities Services at the University of Washington, said universities hoping to expand their usage of IoT systems must come to grips with the cultural differences between operational technology (OT) and IT departments. Facilities managers come up through trades such as electrical or plumbing. Culturally they are very different than central IT employees, yet all of a sudden they are coming togeth-er on projects, Benson said. “Facilities management groups are getting large, complex IT systems thrown in their laps, and they don’t have experience with them,” he said.

The IoT energy management effort at UW has required a team effort by a conservation manager, a mechanical engineer, an IT exec, an electrical engineer, a vendor and a subcontractor, who meet every two weeks to address meter management and data flow. “We have gotten to be a pretty good team,” Benson said, “but three years ago that wasn’t the case. We had lots of issues. But we all acknowledged we come from different places and kept hammering it out.”

Hamilton said one lesson Stanford has learned in this area is that it is important to have people who understand both OT and IT. “For a while things were falling in that gap,” he said. Finding people who knew both the OT systems and IT systems well was a major accomplishment for Stanford, starting about two years

ago, he added. “That is a big problem, and unless most universi-ties address that, projects are going to stall out.”

Benson co-chairs UW’s IoT risk mitigation task force to develop some governance and oversight of these systems. “They span so many organizations that ownership is not clear or nonexistent,” he said. “With the task force, we try to bring groups together and tell stories from their perspective and we find that people do find common issues.” For example, the person who runs campus networks and the person who handles energy management for the university see the same kinds of issues but from different perspectives. “You start to develop common language around it,” he said, “and then you can get to risk mitigation.”

ASU’s Richardson admitted that getting diverse campus groups to come together on smart campus projects has been a challenge, but he said it is definitely getting better. “My advice is to start small and mutually come to an understanding of what is possible and prove what is possible with limited risk, and then iterate on that.”

People may look for traditional payback or return on invest-ment from these projects, and it is often not that simple, Rich-ardson said. “It involves a complex set of relationships. Organiza-tional silos can get in the way. When we talk about governance, it is a massive undertaking, but really exciting. It will take very wide involvement to make it work.”

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David Raths is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer focused on information technology. He writes regularly for several IT publications, including Healthcare Informatics and Govern-ment Technology.

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As Oral Roberts University began work on an augmented and virtual reality initiative back in 2014, academic and technology leaders on campus determined that offering the latest AR/VR content resources to the local Tulsa, OK-based campus was simply not enough. Under the leadership of ORU President William Wilson, and with a strong commitment and a Global-ization Case Statement from the Board of Trustees, the univer-sity set out to “use new paradigms in technologies to reach millions” — addressing both concept skills and professional competence for students around the globe.

The university invested $8.5 million to construct a Global Learning Center that was in full service by AY 2016-2017. The center’s planners decided that AR/VR would be among the key technologies they would use to bring ORU’s education to students worldwide. Along with classrooms, studios, a per-formance hall and conference rooms, the center’s upper level features an AR/VR facility dedicated to content in more than 7,000 academic subjects. To make a growing volume of cur-ricular content more easily accessible for both campus-based and international students, the plan included a Digital IT Concierge service — with a simple search interface that helps students identify the resources and services they need 24/7.

The ambitious plan for AR/VR content discovery and access is a good fit for the university as it defines its role and ser-vices in the digital age. Through the Global Learning Center, students not only experience advanced digital technology routinely, they also become part of ORU’s entire global com-munity of students who have access to educational media and relevant services where and when they need them.

Faculty and staff use the AR/VR platform — with the digital concierge — to collaborate with peers and offer innovative, relevant, interactive content and services. “Our seamless ser-vice and solutions — which harmoniously connect innovative teamwork and leading-edge technologies — are directly ben-efitting students,” said project lead and AVP for Innovation and Technology Michael Mathews.

Operating at scale, and with a need to establish services within an acceptable timeline, the center’s programs must draw on technologies that will support quick and reliable con-tent creation and still promote innovation, experimentation and leadership. ORU chose vendor partners that could align with the university’s vision as well as its development needs.

The university created a supportive and flexible environ-ment for change. Faculty and administrators can browse a library of existing interactive AR/VR lessons to incorporate into their courses, or they can create their own content from scratch. ORU selected the AR/VR software platform by EON Reality as the best fit. With EON’s cloud-based AR/VR platform, ORU can develop, run, manage, access, store, host and distribute its AR/VR applications to a wide range of devices, from smartphones and holographic displays to ORU’s immersive three-dimensional VR room. Faculty and staff of all experience levels have used the platform to create knowl-edge transfer applications and build their development skills as desired. Academic planners observed that these educators have created more than half a million learning objects to date.

Finally, the most important element in the Global Learn-ing Center’s success is delivering all of the newly developed

content resources to their appropriate audiences. Planners partnered with rSmart to implement that company’s OneCampus product — a lightweight, cloud-based service that makes it easy for students to discover and access relevant information. Students query the university’s disparate resources and servic-es via a simple, central interface known on campus as ORU’s Digital IT Concierge. The search-based system sits on top of existing business applications and con-nects users through ORU’s authentication system. The OneCampus solution was deployed without disrup-tion within the first 48 hours.

Now, through the digital concierge, students have access to all of ORU’s mobile and web-based campus services, including curricula, AR/VR lessons, academic calendars, events, advising and practical information such as campus maps and dining services. The Digital IT Concierge has become the center of knowledge transfer across campus. Officials estimate that an

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astonishing 93 billion data transactions are engaged through-out campus each semester through the digital concierge.

For the Global Learning Center, OneCampus is the crucial link that has helped to build a connected and global learn-ing community that prospers from ORU’s advanced AR/VR resources. As Mathews reflected, “ORU is the first university to deploy an enterprise approach to augmented and virtual reality content that can be discovered and accessed by stu-

dents globally through a cloud-based portal. By offering easy access to our Global Learning Center through the Digital IT Concierge, we can now provide students worldwide with full immersion into a digital world that includes many thousands of highly relevant learning objects.”

Meg Lloyd is a Northern California-based freelance writer.

Worldwide IT Spending Ticks UpBY RHEA KELLY

Global spending on IT is expected to increase 1.1 percent this year compared to 2018, reaching a total of $3.79 trillion, accord-ing to a recent forecast from research firm Gartner.

Part of the change can be attributed to political and eco-nomic factors, according to John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “Currency headwinds fueled by the strengthening U.S. dollar have caused us to revise our 2019 IT spending forecast down from the previous quarter,” he said in a statement. “Through the remainder of 2019, the U.S. dollar is expected to trend stronger, while enduring tremendous volatil-ity due to uncertain economic and political environments and trade wars.”

The largest source of growth is the enterprise software mar-ket, driven by a shift of IT spending from on-premise offerings to new, cloud-based alternatives, the Gartner forecast said.

While “the largest cloud shift has so far occurred in application software … Gartner expects increased growth for the infra-structure software segment in the near-term, particularly in in-tegration platform as a service (iPaaS) and application platform as a service (aPaaS).”

In addition, Gartner noted the impact of artificial intelligence on IT spending: “Disruptive emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), will reshape business models as well as the economics of public- and private-sector enterprises. AI is having a major effect on IT spending, although its role is often misunderstood,” said Lovelock. “AI is not a product, it is really a set of techniques or a computer engineering discipline. As such, AI is being embedded in many existing products and services, as well as being central to new development efforts in every industry.”

6 Key Ed Tech Developments on the Horizon BY RHEA KELLY

The most important developments in technology for higher education these days also happen to be the most buzzworthy. Mobile learning, analytics, mixed reality, artificial intel-ligence, blockchain and virtual assistants have all been hot topics in ed tech, and they all “have the potential to expand access and con-venience, foster authentic learning, improve the teaching pro-fession, spread digital fluency, leverage data, and spur further innova-tion.”

That’s according to the latest Educause Horizon Report, an analysis of the trends and technology developments that are

likely to impact higher ed in the short-, mid- and long-term fu-ture. After releasing a preview in February, the higher education IT association an-nounced the full version of the report today.

The report organized the key ed tech developments by adoption timeline: those forecast to hit widespread adoption in one year or less; those hitting the mainstream in two to three years; and those that will take four to five years to achieve adop-tion. First, with a time-to-adoption of one year or less: mobile learning and analytics tech-nologies.

While mobile learning has been around for decades, current

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trends such as increased access to the internet, ever-more-powerful mobile devices and worldwide growth of smartphone ownership are pushing the technology to become a “vital part of the entire learning experience,” according to the report. In particular, “the increased use of aug-mented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) has enabled mobile learn-ing to become more active and collaborative,” the report pointed out, adding that “creat-ing this quality mobile learning experience takes a lot of effort, however, and as a result re-mains in the early stages of adoption.” Other important themes driving mobile learning forward include connectivity and convenience, anywhere/anytime access, content crea-tion and sharing, inter-activity and collaboration with other learners.

“Analytics technologies are a key element of student success initiatives across institutions and a driving force behind the collaborative, targeted strategic planning and decision-making of higher education leaders,” the report noted. These are “dy-namic, connected, predictive, and personalized systems and data” that go “beyond static, descriptive anal-yses of student learning, grades, and behaviors.” In order to tap into the power of these kinds of data and have a real impact on the student experience, institutions must develop “advanced analytics capabilities through innovative leadership, new computational tech-nologies and systems, and a highly skilled workforce equipped for understanding and ef-fectively sharing and using large and complex data resources.”

Next, with a time-to-adoption of two to three years: mixed reality and artificial intelligence. Mixed reality, an umbrella term for virtual reality, augmented reality and a blend of the two, enables immersive, experiential learning “by dramati-cally expanding the range of tasks and activities with which a learner can gain experience,” the report said. Perhaps MR’s biggest potential for learning and assessment is its interactivity, allowing learners to “con-struct new understanding based on experiences with virtual objects that bring underlying data to life.” More experimentation is needed, however: “For MR to be meaningfully inte-grated into teaching and learning, it must become familiar to the instructional designers and instructional technologists on campus so that they can help instructors inte-grate MR into their pedagogy,” the report asserted.

Artificial intelligence, or the use of “computer systems to accomplish tasks and activities that have historically relied on human cognition,” has a number of potential applications in higher education — particularly its ability to “personalize experiences, reduce workloads, and assist with analysis of large and complex data sets,” the report said. The caveat: “Concerns over equity, inclusion, and privacy temper enthusiasm for adop-

tion.” Still, a growing number of higher education institutions are “partnering with industry to create AI-driven solutions for the purposes of reducing college costs and allowing students to per-sonalize their learning experiences to best meet their needs.” Use cases include AI chat-bots for boosting student

engagement, using algo-rithms to customize course content for students, AI for institutional data mining, and AI-enabled tutoring.

Finally, with a time-to-adoption of four to five years: blockchain and virtual as-sistants.

While “broad adoption of blockchain in higher education remains at least several years out,” colleges and universities are “investigating ways in which the technology could be used for areas including transcripts, smart contracts, and identity management,” the report said. By far, most of the current work with blockchain in higher educa-tion centers around transcripts and records of achievement. “The capabilities of digital tools have prompted alternatives to traditional transcripts that include much more detail and even ar-tifacts about a student’s learning,” the report noted. “Block-chain could extend that model, creating a permanent, detailed record of formal and informal learning that allows individu-al users to control what is included in their learning record and who may access that in-formation.” That includes “information about courses and degrees, certifications, badges and other microcredentials, co-curricular activities, internships and em-ployment, and oth-er competencies and credentials,” which could “follow students from one institution to an-other, serving as verifiable evidence of learning and enabling simpler transfer of credits across institutions.”

Developments in automated speech recognition and natural language processing have brought virtual assistants to the fore-front (one need look no further than the popularity of Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa), and they are “already capable of meet-ing basic student needs related to campus information and support services,” the report said. Several U.S. universities have piloted Amazon Echo Dot devices, for instance, to “provide students with information ranging from academic advisory services to help with financial aid.” And, the report continued, “as the capability of interacting through natural conversation in-creases, educational uses for learners of all languages mul-tiply. Virtual assistants are ex-pected to be used for research, tutoring, writing, and editing. Similarly, virtual tutors and virtual facilitators will soon be able to generate customizable and con-versational learning experiences currently found in a variety of adaptive learning platforms.”

The Horizon Report is based on insights from a global panel of 98 experts across the higher education landscape.

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By far, most of the current work with blockchain in higher education centers around transcripts and records of achievement.