Horizon Report 2014 - Higher Education Edition

The Horizon Report 2014 - Higher Education Edition has been released. This year's edition has a new format that now includes Key Trends Accelerating Higher Education Technology Adoption and Significant Challenges Impeding Higher Education Technology Adoption.

The 2014 six important developments in educational technology are listed in in the report's third section, Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education:

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

• Flipped Classroom
• Learning Analytics

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

• 3D Printing
• Games and Gamification

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

• Quantified Self
• Virtual Assistants

Regarding last year's report, Quantified Self and Flipped Classrooms are new. Games and Gamification is kept on the "Two to Three Years" horizon. This is what the report says about it:

"The games culture has grown to include a substantial proportion of the world’s population, with the age of the average gamer increasing with each passing year. As tablets and smartphones have proliferated, desktop and laptop computers, television sets, and gaming consoles are no longer the only way to connect with other players online, making game-play a portable activity that can happen in a diverse array of settings. Gameplay has long since moved on from solely being recreational and has found considerable traction in the military, business and industry, and increasingly, education as a useful training and motivation tool. While a growing number of educational institutions and programs are experimenting with game-play, there has also been increased attention surrounding gamification — the integration of gaming elements, mechanics, and frameworks into non-game situations and scenarios. Businesses have embraced gamification as a way to design incentive programs that engage employees through rewards, leader boards, and badges, often with a mobile component. Although more nascent than in military or industry settings, the gamification of education is gaining support among educators who recognize that effectively designed games can stimulate large gains in productivity and creativity among learners."

About the Quantified Self trend, the report mentions that:

"People have always demonstrated interest in learning about themselves by tracking and measuring their behaviors and activities. Students already spend time in formal classroom settings gathering data about themselves or research topics. Quantified self technologies tap into this interest in the form of mobile apps, wearable devices, and cloud-based services that make the data collection process much easier."

The Quantified Self movement can benefit from gamification. In fact, if people are able to track and measure their behaviors, adding the proper game elements, they can be motivated to improve those behaviors, increase engagement in activities promoting those behaviors and change undesirable behaviors. This is the all idea behind gamification. And Education can benefit from both trends: gamification and the quantified self.

In this post published on Gamifeye, four approaches were mentioned to collecting data in gamified systems. Quantified self with gamification is the second approach, "using some external device". In Education they are also connected to Learning Analytics.