Serendipity35

The headline came up this week in my feed, "5 Education themes that impacted the industry in 2017." The caveat, perhaps, is that this story ran in the India Times, which made me curious how different those trends might be from the U.S.

They mention that trying to show ROI from earlier trends (flipped classrooms, multilingual learning, faculty professional development, gamification, personalized and adaptive learning, online secure infrastructure, knowledge networks and virtual simulated practice environments etc.) and being pushed to stay ahead of the technology curve might make adoption of newer trends more difficult. Education apps for content, distribution, and collaboration are also in the mix.

In India, the e-learning market hit almost 11 billion in USD in 2016. Here are the 5 trends seen there this year in brief (in this article's perspective).

Personalized learning - bundling content in a specific learning environment that meets the individual student's needs. Content is generally delivered through online and micro learning.

The Cloud - has become cheaper, faster and green.

Safeguarding Personal Identifiable Information (PII) - Our digital footprints - both intentional and unintentional ones - leave learners open to even more vulnerabilities than the average citizen, but losing data and reputation besides the financial damage and emotional distress and overall risk. 4

Gamification, Simulations and Digital Badging - this has been a "trend" for so many years without ever being fully realized that I wonder if it belongs on trend lists any more. Yes, phone apps use gamification as a technique to keep you hooked through notifications, points, and rewards, so that learners are already used to using to them - and probably expect them in many instances. I still don't see a widely accepted of awarding achievement or recognition. 

Leveraging Learning Analytics - AI plays a role in making it possible for a machine to learn over millions of interaction inputs and predict student errors, trends and projections.