Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash

The scenery of ed-tech is undeniably changing faster beyond its years as the pandemic accelerated, propelled, and coerced education to take place remotely. Many of us have already witnessed the “prevalence of dataveillance, digital deskilling and the de-territorialization of schooling” (Selwyn et al., 2020), within our institutions, even before COVID. Institutions are now, more than ever, required to participate in the data-centric and “innovation-obsessed” (Maughan, 2014) culture to platformize, digitize, and optimize the remote learning and teaching processes to stay in business.

In reading the scenarios from Macgilchrist et al., (2020), the vignettes from Selwyn et al., (2020), and a dash of personal experience working at a local college. This blog briefly speculates the reverberations in the higher education settings in 10 years:

• • Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) becomes the standard learning environment;
  • Virtual reality and simulations replace most experiential learning;
  • Learners no longer need to leave their home, town, and country to attend any institutions worldwide. All can be done via remote learning.

In the following blog post, I will unpack each topic to discuss the various possible impact and outcomes from the decisions made in the present time, reflecting on the lessons learned from the past to speculate the future scenery in education for learners, educators, and society in both positive and negative ways.

References:

Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., & Bruch, A. (2020). Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235

Maughan, T. (2014, June 22). The future of ed tech is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Medium. https://medium.com/futures-exchange/the-future-of-ed-tech-is-here-its-just-not-evenly-distributed-210778a423d7

Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944