The 2020 Horizon Report was published by EDUCAUSE*, a global nonprofit organization whose members include US and international higher education institutions, corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and K–12 institutions.

In the report, they have sought to retain the elements that higher education professionals and leaders have come to value over many years—its focus on the trends, technologies, and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning, based on a methodology that grounds the findings in the perspectives and expertise of a panel of leaders in higher education. Also, they have sought to innovate and improve upon the report this year, moving the focus away from forecasts for adoption and toward more evocative portraits of possible futures.

The report begins with a scan of our current environment to identify the major trends that are shaping global higher education and teaching and learning. The Horizon Expert Panel named fifteen social, technological, economic, higher education, and political trends that signal departures from the past, that are influencing the present, and that will almost certainly help shape the future. For educational technologies, the report moves away from the time-to-adoption structure, which implied a prediction precision that the project was unable to achieve. In its place, the new report offers evidence, data, and scenarios. The report includes evidence for the trends, as well as panelists’ quantitative ratings of factors that often temper actual adoption of emerging technologies and practices in higher education. These factors include the impact on learning outcomes, level of risk in adoption, faculty receptiveness, issues of equity and inclusion, and required level of spending.

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Reference

Malcolm Brown, Mark McCormack, Jamie Reeves, D. Christopher Brooks, and Susan Grajek, with Bryan Alexander, Maha Bali, Stephanie Bulger, Shawna Dark, Nicole Engelbert, Kevin Gannon, Adrienne Gauthier, David Gibson, Rob Gibson, Brigitte Lundin, George Veletsianos, and Nicole Weber (2020) EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, Teaching and Learning Edition (Louisville, CO: EDUCAUSE, 2020).