The major technology development during 2010 was the launch of Apple’s iPad. The iPad has yet to prove its worth as an educational tool. It is valuable for ‘consumption’, for example access to media and e-books, but has more limitations on ‘production’, as it stands at the moment. Version 2 includes more ‘production’ functionality, such as a camera, and software to facilitate multimedia creation. With the movement towards learner-generated content this is a major limitation of tablets so far for educational purposes. Furthermore, phones, tablets and laptops are converging, so that, combined with cloud computing, the full functionality of a computer will eventually be available on the smallest devices.
Also there were further improvements in 2010 on the functionality of mobile phones, although educational applications remain tiny compared with other areas, such as entertainment and publishing. One barrier to educational applications is the multiplicity of mobile operating systems; another is the lack of a clear model of design for mobile learning. The release of the HTML5 standard for web applications, platform for mobile applications, is unlikely before 2012.
Оpen content is most likely to be used in a context where courses are explicitly designed around the concept of open content. Instead, students would be encouraged, within certain guidelines and academic criteria, to search the Internet and to collect local data to create their own blogs and wikis that would demonstrate their knowledge within a particular subject domain. Another strong development in these resources is the increased use of multimedia such as video, animations, simulations and, to a much lesser extent, games.
The application of business intelligence software to learning and learners is likely to be the next perspective in e-learning. Institutions accumulate a great deal of data about students. This is rarely used for the purposes of academic decision-making, mainly because it has up to now required a huge effort to analyze such data in terms of specific decisions. Learning analytics do this through software that ‘sits on top’ of the several different databases used in universities, such financial systems.
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