Introduction

The educational field has long trailed all other industries in terms of adopting new technology and in adapting age-old practices to harness the power of technology. The electronic age has failed to make in-roads into the educational domain due to the proffered technology being little more than hyper-media systems offering up electronic versions of material easily found in most textbooks and library resources. With instructional technologists researching, developing, and documenting new learning paradigms coupled with industry needs far outstripping the current educational system’s ability to educate and train adequately, a crisis is brewing which will finally force the educational system’s hand to begin massive restructuring. Are you ready?

Technology Trends

Over the last 30 years, technology has been evolving at breakneck speeds and has infiltrated practically every industry, frequently radically altering how companies in those realms do business. With companies investing more research dollars into their respective industries than ever before, it only follows that technology and innovations will only continue to accelerate over the next ten years.

Computer technology in particular, if current trends in speed, miniaturization, bandwidth and storage capacity continue and Moore’s law, which posits that the density of transistors doubles every 18 months (and thus processing capacity make similar leaps in speed), then full fledged computers will be no larger than the size of today’s PDAs, yet have a processing prowess that clips along at 212 gigahertz, or nearly 70 times as powerful as today’s top-selling desktops. Hard drives will be the size of a dime; yet will hold hundreds of gigabytes of data and the machines will always be connected wirelessly to a network no matter where you are. The technologies coming out Internet 2 today will be widespread and offer enough bandwidth to handle even the heaviest data loads with streaming voice and video content for the next 10 to 20 years.

Programming environments continue to make huge leaps and bounds. New, and ever more complex frameworks and languages such as .NET and XML continue to be developed and refined, putting a fast amount of power into the programmer’s hand allowing them to write less code, yet do more. The new frameworks begin solve the ever-recurring problems right out of the box. Such recurring problems include fundamental things such as how applications communicate with each other, how interfaces are built and presented to users, and how business processes are modeled and implemented; all of which today’s software developers continue to re-implement at the start of every project, essentially reinventing the wheel before they can make true progress in their new development efforts.

Today’s ubiquitous web browser will no longer be just a tool for presenting information and simple form entry. With the coming standards for defining and exchanging data, such as XML and BPML, tomorrow’s web-content will have meaning attached to virtually every piece of data, enabling browsers to do tasks well beyond simply displaying data. The browsers of tomorrow will be able to interpret page and article contents, catalog and store page contents in organized format, narrowly and accurately define web-searches and retrieve exactly the information you seek over the extraordinarily vast network the Internet will become over the next ten years. More importantly, data will be able to cross application boundaries and users will have intuitive tools for creating computer interpretable meaning in their documents and the data elements within them that will be likened to the ability of today’s spreadsheet applications to manipulate and tabulate numerical and columnar data.

All of these wide-ranging technological advances are confluencing in such a way that businesses are no longer sitting around waiting for new solutions to be developed. In fact, new technologies are enabling businesses to modify and enhance their business practices at such a pace that they can no longer keep their employees up-to-date and well trained to do their jobs. This is bringing about a crisis of sorts in the educational field as companies recognize that today’s still widespread teaching methods, which are still grounded in lecture based information delivery, graded homework assignments, and periodic testing procedures, just aren’t cutting it any more.

Industry Trends

While just about every other industry has fully integrated and adapted their business practices to take full advantage of what technology has to offer, the educational system is still largely taught using age-old principles and techniques. When technology is introduced into the classroom, it is often of the sort designed to reach a larger audience with fewer dollars expended than as a true enabler of new teaching paradigms. In other words, the technology in today’s classroom is rarely more than an electronic reproduction and jazzed up presentation of material found in books.

Industries are recognizing the educational system’s status quo and identifying it as a dilemma because the schools and teaching methodologies currently in widespread use are unable to train the company’s employees and provide them with new knowledge in a timely basis. Just-in-time manufacturing was all the rage ten years ago and is now being proven an overwhelming success in today’s recession market. Companies are starting to subscribe to the idea that training efforts also need to be just-in-time initiatives where just the right amount of knowledge needs to be provided at just the right time in just the right place so that the company can leverage all of their talent in harvesting the full potential to capitalize on market share and thus bolster profit margins.

As a result of this pressure, many new training companies have sprung up to meet the demanding training needs of companies large and small. Companies have also taken matters into their own hands in forming full-fledged in-house training centers. Colleges are also responding with new “professional” programs and intensive abbreviated workshops and boot camps. Many of these new outfits are employing some of the latest researches and trends from the field of instructional technology and are reaping the rewards for their efforts.

The Future of Education

Our current educational system is under-funded, under-staffed, and well behind all other industries in terms of improving their teaching practices and using new technologies to improve the teaching process. The public educational system is ripe to undergo numerous radical changes over the next ten years. As the new learning techniques gain more exposure and the hype surrounding implementing technology for technology’s sake in the classrooms die down, we will continue to see these new learning paradigms make in-roads into private sector and eventually into classrooms. Instructional technologists and designers will have a rare chance to step into the limelight and lead the industry as this educational market explodes upon the scene.

The first truth that will emerge is the fact that technology will not replace the teacher. Instead, technology will begin to change the entire administrative structure of the educational system, bringing the entire domain in line with how today’s businesses are structured in most other industries. Technology will begin to help schools track teachers and teachers to track students and collaborate with parents and other teachers. As teachers collaborate more, they will begin to form into teams working together to educate the student body. Ultimately, teachers will parallel other industries by evolving into highly trained specialists such as lecturers, tutors, learning specialists, counselors and subject matter experts. Instructional design and technologies that bring this teamwork to life will penetrate deeply into the educational system over the next ten years.

Real-time practices that industries utilize today to track customers, product fulfillment, and employee productivity will be adapted to track students and their study progress in real-time. The educational system will adapt from a grade-based system to one of standards based in conjunction with performance indicators for the students. Teachers will be freed from spending undue amounts of time grading and ranking students as software solutions are developed to automatically track student progress, producing full and accurate snapshots of all students at any point and time in the curriculum. Not only will teachers spend less time with administrative tasks and more time with the students, the entire team of teachers will be constantly up-to-date on any one student’s progress as he/she circulates amongst the team of specialists.

The best school systems will reflect a structure that closely models other industries in terms of corporate structure. Not only will teachers evolve into specialists and work in a team format similar to today’s businesses, there will be research and development areas designed to constantly research, evaluate, improve and implement instructional design and delivery as well as executive branches to oversee the entire infrastructure and outreach services to market the school and secure parental involvement in all stages of their children’s education.

This evolution of the educational field will spur numerous new occupational opportunities, whether within the school system proper or within firms providing services to the schools. As teachers become specialists, this shift, more than anything will usher in outsourcing firms to replace full-time teachers. In other words, teachers will become full-time professionals who’s services are hired out as needed, thus economically providing just the right amount of services at just the right time to meet a student body’s needs. Teacher salaries will rise through continuous professional development and corresponding demand for their services as schools clamor to contract their services.

Not all school systems will be public school systems. In fact, it will be private schools that start up and actively invests in corporate structure, technologies, and outsourcing arrangements that keep their economics on a profitable outlook that will begin to displace public school systems. It is these schools that crop up and utilize standard, proven business practices to optimize their services that will ultimately put the squeeze on the public and traditional private school systems to change. As the new learning paradigms perpetrated by these new schools become more widespread and popular, taxpayers will lobby to keep their educational tax dollars in order to send their children to these forward thinking schools, or at the very least, force the public system to radically restructure to regain the public’s confidence.

The Future is Closer Than You May Think

The evidence of this forthcoming change is all around us today. Business practices and processes are becoming ever more well defined, understood and implemented in technologies. Businesses themselves continue to master the art of inter-company communication through robust and open technology standards. Businesses are growing and changing so fast that they are, in effect, creating entirely new educational markets geared to keeping their employees well trained and up to speed on latest technologies and business trends. Not only are the businesses spurring the new demands for education and timely training, their very business practices are generating the technologies that will make these new schools nimble, adaptable, economically feasible, capable of keeping pace with new instructional theories and practices, and ultimately far outpacing today’s schools in educating their students.

Today’s top colleges are already feeling the market share pinch. In an attempt to compete with these highly specialized training companies, colleges are adapting their programs to be more consumer oriented. The new startup schools are already using the latest instructional technology trends available today to meet the training needs of companies. It is only a matter of time before this new breed of economically driven schools along with supporting businesses and outsourcing agents begin to saturate their industry markets and start to look for other avenues of growth. When they do, they will begin to turn towards K-12 and find creative and profitable ways to bring their teaching organizations and practices into direct competition or partnership with the public and private schools scattered across the nation. Just about every aspect of today’s business technology practices will fuel this new market, including communication and collaboration technologies, programming tools, data storage and security, real-time tracking and monitoring systems, training and outsourcing services, and most especially instructional design and technology research, development and implementation.

Are you ready for the coming educational market boom?