Education 2.0

New technologies in the classroom, and the dynamics of the Web, are transforming the ways in which students and teachers interact with educational media and practices, opening the learning experience up to many new approaches.

Libraries and classrooms in educational institutions may see fewer books and more digital devices in future, as cheap e-readers and electronic books create the ability to store, move and collaborate around thousands of available texts. Source:Flickr/Katerha

Text alone will not hold the attention of today's school children who are digital natives. Google, blogs, social media and collaborative knowledge management mean students are not only exposed to more information they can also easily search and access any information or knowledge they desire, access expert knowledge and collaborate real-time over distances. The amount of information available outside the classroom today is greater by an order of magnitude compared to what was available just 10 years ago. More recently, textbooks are beginning to face pressure from e-books and the Web, as more institutions look to both leverage digital media and cut costs as budget pressures grow.

Signals:

The global market for e-learning market reached an estimated USD$27 billion in 2009, according to Ambient Research, a figure expected to double by 2014. Of this, North America is and will continue to be the highest spending region globally for the foreseeable future.
Investment in digital education initiatives are gaining an increasingly high profile as public education metrics weaken across major countries and budget shortfalls become more frequent. Major foundations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have put forward grants to help further develop digital learning to help education meet 21st century needs.
With the advent of inexpensive netbooks and e-readers, regional education authorities in many areas have begun to look at digital textbooks as a low- or no-cost way of delivering up-to-date curricula to students already savvy in technology usage.

Implications:

Use of digital education tools and content has the potential to completely reorder the education “supply chain” in many areas, with curriculum creators needing to shift to new development processes, sources of content and delivery structures to feed electronic learning.
Traditional one-to-many models of learning will increasingly need to shift to one-to-one and collaborative models of teaching and learning as technology allows students, teachers and others involved inside and outside the classroom to interact in many different ways.
Digital education divides may be exacerbated as school systems with access to funding and resources pull further ahead of resource-poor areas.
Digital education initiatives will give a boost to innovation around content and collaboration, and will also draw in other industries.

Countertrends:

Conservative governments in developed countries are pushing for smaller government and less investment in public services, of which education is one. As a result, development of education 2.0 may be slowed or even halted in some areas due to a desire to focus on other services, or on perceived core education building blocks, such as the old “3Rs”.

Extrapolations:

Full implementation of digital education would mean a complete reworking of education systems, away from the Fordist model of the 19th and 20th centuries, toward a more co-creative system that provides cradle-to-grave access to both learning and teaching. Educational institutions would more closely resemble media startups and laboratories than today’s schoolrooms.