What is the next trend in online education?

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Peter Baskerville

The greatest attribute of online education is that it can be delivered at the moment of learning need utilizing the mobile technologies of the smartphone and the electronic tablet. These tools allow the very effective master/apprentice training model to be applied to all learning disciplines in a scalable low cost way.

So, I see the next and ultimate destination of online learning being a learning system that meets the learning needs of individuals at the moment of need, to a level sufficient to solve the pressing problem and delivered using a video instructional approach by experts on mobile devices, as the data provided by IDC Tracker below demonstrates.
Breaking it up further, here is the vision I see for the future trends in online education:
Platform

• Mobile - Smartphones and tablets

Delivery and process

• Just-in-time learning - Successful online learning will be designed to meet the needs of learners at the point of learning need. Enabled by the rapid uptake of mobile devices, eLearning 'at the speed of need' will become the norm where learning is embedded with the work and is provided just-in-time. Online learning delivered as informal bite-sized learning will be on-demand and embedded in the workplace and on the job.
• Video based learning - Video instructions will dominate online education because it can address all the learning styles of individuals and includes aural (listening), caption (text), visual and kinaesthetic (practical and video pause/repeat) preferences. The previous constraints around bandwidth have been mitigated by technological advances allowing videos to dominate the landscape with their cheap production costs, their engaging on-demand access and their more viral nature.
• Continuous improvement - The most successful online learning products in the future will utilise the collaborative efforts of the 'best on planet' teachers regardless of their geographic location to ensure the learning content is being continuously updated and improved to reflect current best practice.
• Learn in one hour - Competency based learning (skills) rather than time-based learning will totally dominate the future of online learning. With access to research, information and expert advice at their fingertips, the capacity to learn for online learners has increased exponentially meaning that new skills can be acquired rapidly ... in one hour.
• Gamification - ELearning developers will adopt gamification principles in an effort to make learning sticker in terms of time engagement, to increase the attraction of the learning content and to provide a more complete badge/status record of learning achievement than is possible using conventional and formal course assessments.

Content

• Highly contextualized learning - The generic teaching of current educational models will give way to highly contextualized learning that is custom designed for learner level (beginner, practising, mastery), job status (staff, supervisor, senior manager), location (jurisdiction, climate, culture), organisation type (startup, SME, corporate, non-profit, Government) and industry (according to the Global Industry Classification Standard)
• Learning sufficiency - Online learning will be highly flexible leaving the individual to determine their own learning path based on their current knowledge, learning needs and preferred learning styles. Learning will be sufficient to solve the pressing problem and no more. Background knowledge will be the option not the pre-requisite.
• Crowdbased teaching - Just as the Internet made everyone a journalist, so too will it make everyone a teacher. The next trend in online learning will embrace the crowd and allow people with knowledge and expertise (regardless of their formal teaching qualifications) to share it with their followers.
• Learn to earn - Learning to simply gain awards, 'pieces of paper' and recognition will give way to the desire of learning to earn. The fact the learners can apply their newly acquired learning immediately to their online businesses, will make this learning highly sort after and valued.

Business model

• Costs will plummet - As the Internet reached beyond the 33% of the world currently connected, and as learning becomes the thing we all do in our down time, expect the cost of learning to plummet. The sheer scalability of digital based learning coupled with the mass demand means that profitable delivery models can be built charging a fraction of the cost of existing offers.
• Edupreneurs and Teacherpreneurs will rise up in their 10s of thousands as they bypass the existing government/institution monopoly on education to deliver relevant contextualised learning to the masses for a fraction of the cost of existing offers. Just as blog sites rose up to creatively destroy centuries-old newspaper brands, expect the same from edupreneurs and teacherpreneurs as they creatively destroy the value proposition of centuries-old educational institutions.

Comparing the points listed above with our current outdated industrial-aged education system, it's easy to see why some people are calling the future developments in online learning .... a paradigm shift and revolution.

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