NMC Horizon report

The two reports that most captured my interest were the Educause Seven Things and the New Media Consortium 2012 Horizon report. I had discovered both prior to this course and found them valuable for understanding technology trends and challenging my current and future teaching strategies. I would share the Educause Seven Things with other educators, but the NMC Horizon report is a valuable resource to be shared with a much broader audience than purely educators – and includes learning technology specialists and venturers but also CIOs and CEOs of any education “business”.

The strengths of the NMC Horizon reports are:

  • Specificity – there is a NMC Horizon report for higher education, K-12 and museum education that focuses on technologies applicable to each area.
  • Global, collaborative input. Technologies are identified through “free, open forums that facilitate global collaboration and encourage smarter discovery” comprising input from hundreds of technologists, educators, and representatives from business.
  • Expert input. Apart from the expertise from the global forums themselves, there are 47 members of the International Advisory Board for Higher Education who were involved in developing the NMC Horizon Project Short List 2012 and then by consensus the six topics outlined in the final report. A review of the list of the members of the Advisory Board demonstrates how truly broad and international it is.
  • Future focused. The report is adoption and future focused, commencing with clearly articulated sections on key trends in higher education and challenges for institutions; followed by identification of  potential emergent technologies over the next five years – near (12 month), mid (2-3 years) and far term horizons (3-4 years).
  • Well researched. The report is developed from the global forum dialogues, articles, papers, project examples, websites and research.
  • Open access. The forums are free and open for collaboration globally, the reports and papers are open access through Creative Commons Attribution license, and all the research materials used can be accessed  through the searchable, social research database (the NMC Horizon Project Navigator).
  • Well written. The final reports are easy to read for broad audience (technologists to educators to CEOs and Boards). Each technology is succinctly explained, its relevance to teaching and learning identified with examples, and there is an extensive reference and resources list.

The final report NMC Horizon 2012 Higher Education (along with the NMC Horizon Project Short List 2012) provide all higher education and training markets that support elearning, and their customers/buyers (from educators to Boards) with a succinct report to consider the impacts of emerging technologies, what technologies they may choose to integrate into their organisation’s strategic plans and how they might begin to plan for this.

These reports are ones I would review annually. Whilst I would recommend them to my educator colleagues in vocational training, I would also recommend our Senior Management team, CEO and Board members of our organisation to read these to inform our Strategic Plan 2013-2016 regarding further integration of online technologies, whilst also laying the groundwork beyond this 3 years.

I would also encourage the managers in the National Australian GP Training Program to review how they can support and develop online technologies across all regional training providers in a future driven but co-ordinated way.

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