A few days ago, I linked to the 2019 Horizon Report. Since then, I’ve seen a few articles digesting the contents, including this one in Campus Technology titled, “3 Ed Tech Trends Stuck on the Horizon (and Why)”. This article does a nice job of summarizing the Horizon Report’s coverage of three technologies that have missed their previous predictions of widespread educational adoption, including:
- adaptive learning,
- augmented and mixed reality,
- and gaming and gamification
I’m nowhere near an expert in any of these three areas, but we recently met a new contact who is deeply involved in the second category. It’s far too soon to say if a collaboration will formalize from our preliminary conversations, but the “Fail or Scale” coverage within the Horizon Report caught my attention.
As noted in the Campus Technology summary:
Initially, in 2016, AR and VR were deemed just two to three years from broad adoption; last year that timeline was pushed out to four to five years away from adoption. Why is it remaining so elusive …? First, the tech itself gets in the way. It’s uncomfortable to wear big, heavy goggles on your head for very long. But more importantly, Ashford-Rowe asserted, there needs to be a well-defined gain on the educational side for using AR and VR — and that can turn out to be a heavy lift. If the main benefit is giving students authentic experiences — to make them “work-ready” — that means faculty need to be able to identify those components that “determine authenticity” and then, once those are identified, to invest the effort in tweaking the learning experience “to ensure a higher degree of fidelity or authenticity.”
Go figure! The design of the learning experience does matter!