Benchmark: Horizon Scanning

From Benchmarking-Tel

Contents 1 Benchmark: Horizon Scanning 1.1 The Horizon Report 1.2 The Prolearn Roadmap 1.3 Conclusion

1 Benchmark: Horizon Scanning

Horizon scanning is a very significant part of any research field. For technology enhanced learning there are a number of organizations that have formal horizon scanning reports and methodologies.

Possibly the best known is the New Media Consortium ‘Horizon’ reports which are now conducted in collaboration with Educause. Over the last 6 years these reports provide a yearly scan of the new media horizon pertaining to learning. They take a range of literature feeds an conduct a “Delphi style” analysis with a panel of subject specialists (see http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki).

Similarly, the network of excellence Prolearn has produced a high level roadmap containing a future vision for professional technology-enhanced learning. A gap analysis identified the state of the art and the critical gaps between what is and what needs to be.

1.1 The Horizon Report

With respect to the key issues that drive the horizon scan, the 2008 Horizon Report lists 5 questions that they have used to drive the analysis:

1. “What would you list among the established technologies that learning-focused institutions should all be using broadly today to support or enhance teaching, learning, or creative expression?
2. What technologies that have a solid user base in consumer, entertainment, or other industries should learning-focused institutions be actively looking for ways to apply?
3. What are the key emerging technologies you see developing to the point that learning focused institutions should begin to take notice during the next 3 to 5 years? What organizations or companies are the leaders in these technologies?
4. What do you see as the key challenges related to teaching, learning, or creative expression that learning-focused institutions will face during the next 5 years?
5. What trends do you expect to have a significant impact on the ways in which learning-focused institutions approach our core missions of teaching, research, and service?”

Each year, the executive summary identifies a small set of ‘critical challenges’ for the field of higher education, from this perspective. For example, the Horizon 2008 report identified four key challenges facing the field of Technology Enhanced Learning from that year: “

1. Significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression, and learning have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
2. Higher education is facing a growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices.
3. The renewed emphasis on collaborative learning is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interaction and assessment.
4. The academy is faced with a need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s tools.”

In 2009 edition the critical challenges have become: “

1. There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
2. Students are different, but a lot of educational material is not.
3. Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
4. We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
5. Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content, and media to mobile devices.”

In all of the reports, issues like the tensions of measurement and assessment, and general challenges of leadership and direction tend to figure as ‘chronic’ features of this field. Some trends (in the reporting) are clear, such as a growing emphasis on mobile and ubiquity in the technologies used in learning.

1.2 The Prolearn Roadmap

The Prolearn Network provided a significant forward looking document as its roadmap toward professional learning in 2020, which includes six statements to characterise the vision as follows:

• Vision statement I: “Everyone should be able to learn anything at anytime at anyplace.” The main goal is to provide the right learning experiences at the right time for the right person. The statement is closely linked to the IST challenge. It embraces issues of digital convergence of communication networks, media, content and devices. The new capabilities offered by recent advances in mobile and internet communications can support and facilitate mobility towards a lifelong learning environment, enabling the creation, storage, management and access to knowledge everywhere and every time. The aim is to create and deliver a personalized learning experience to everyone.

• Vision statement II: “Learning as a means to support and enhance work performance.” The main goals are to support human performance improvements and to provide links between business processes, competencies and learning processes; and use TEPL to design high quality work-based learning activities so that learning and working becomes interlocked. The statement is related to specific industry challenges, such as performance support and performance improvements at the work place.

• Vision statement III: “Promote innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship at work.” This vision encompasses a variety of goals such as: a) Learning supporting radical change in an organization and improving ability to change; and b) Competency development (including thinking out of the box, creativity, asking the right questions, leadership). The statement is related to industry challenges such as investment and development of the company’s human capital and use of learning to support ability to change in organization.

• Vision statement IV: “Learning as a means to increase employability.” This statement focuses on the Learner’s perspective, the employees’ continuous professional development, and the need to increase employability. The goals in this vision include resilience, employability, getting skilled faster and personal growth. Enhanced mobility, employability, and competency of the European workforce. Portability of learning achievements is one of the key-issues to be addressed.

• Vision statement V: Market take-up. “Professional e-learning will be a commodity market in 2015.” This statement focuses on market take up of TEPL and the ability to purchase content and learning services regardless of type and country of the learner supplier in a unified transparent market. The main goals in this vision include market transparency, consumer driven market, one-stop-shopping, wider choice at all levels, and selection optimization. Development of both segments of the market: from the low-end commodity market to the high-end upscale, high value-added segment. There are two alternative ways to achieving this vision. One is about the commodity market being based on the ‘canned courses’ concept, while the other is based on communities of practice and collaborative creation and sharing of professional know-how.

• Vision statement VI: Socially inclusion. “High quality learning for all.” This statement addresses social inclusion issues, such as digital divide, the gap between poor and rich etc. The goal will be to democratize knowledge provision and to support the so-called e-Inclusion and equal opportunities for all in the workplace.

After negotiating this vision, a gap analysis phase started during which, a comparison between the state of the art and the vision statements was performed in order to identify the gaps between what is available today and what is needed for the future, set capability targets and requirements and derive the strategy (actions & recommendations) needed to fill these gaps. The roadmap approach has aimed to identify the current strengths (existing capabilities), weaknesses (missing or inadequate capabilities), opportunities (key future capabilities) and capability-related threats (problematic factors such as competition for sources of capabilities and resources needed to acquire new capabilities or re-direct existing capabilities) and which will contribute to the realization of the visions.

1.3 Conclusion

Both initiatives, the Horizon Report and the Prolearn Roadmap, provide valuable insights into visions and challenges technology-enhanced learning as a field faces today and reflect the assessment of priorities of important expert groups in the field.

Both reports share an underlying theme that imposes a particular ‘benchmarking’ challenge to STELLAR: the Horizon report identifies challenges in leadership and direction as well as tensions in measurement and assessment; several of the vision statements of the Prolearn roadmap relate to access, performance, and outreach.

STELLAR needs to take the lessons of these communities on board as it begins its work.