7 Major Online Education Trends to Catch in 2017

With 2017 now right in its pace in both the educational and corporate world, we are beginning to see the practical implementations of the signs seen emerging last year. As for this post, we’ll talk about the growing trends in the online education.

The internet is full of plenty resources to learn digital skills already. Many kids educational games are making to the top of the chart in Android and iPhone app stores.

For a start, we can look around us and evaluate the tools and methodologies used today in colleges and universities. So let’s discuss the trends of online education or e-learning we will most likely encounter throughout 2017 and beyond to the future.

Gamification

Quite a surprise, though, but gamification has been in the education industry for quite some time now. Students are tempted towards the elements of gamification regardless of their age or gender.

The gamified environment allows them to learn from their mistakes, get recognized, appreciated and rewarded for delivering the rights answers, and the most uniform part throughout the experience—a fun-filled time.

It’s up to the creativity of teachers on how they manage to gamify even the most boring and rigorous topics, that will transform the experience into an exciting and interesting one, what once was a dreadful class. The trend is likely to gain momentum over the course of 2017 across the institutions worldwide.


Here is a YouTube playlist about gamification of education.

Personalized Learning

Ideally, the most effective and best type of learning is the personalized learning that helps to cater the needs of each student uniquely. 

When each learner is attended the way and style in which he/she is most comfortable, they tend to become more engaged, and shows high probability of information retention. Since a school or online class enlists a number of student, the job to cater each learner’s requirements individually is a tough job for any instructor. 

But 2017 is showing a promising trend to better handle the prospect of personalized learning across different channels of communication. This year more LMS vendors are working on the idea of personalized features of goals engines and rules engines, serving the purpose of helping teachers and instructors in devising more personalized learning paths for the ease and mental development of students.

Bite-Sized Learning

As kids, we always pondered over the fact why our parents constantly instructed us to stay still in the class, and listen what our teacher has to say in a 45-minutes to 1-hour period. 

Science has determined that a human brain’s attention span lasts shorter than that of the goldfish, a healthy adult is expected to remain intensely focused on a thing for around 20 minutes. On the other hand, the concept of bite-sized learning chunks is perfectly applicable for children no matter what the age. 

It is proven that disintegrating a large subject or topic into smaller bite-sized learning materials enables a normal student to understand and grasp the topic more strongly and is also long-lasting. Therefore, it’s no surprise 2017 is seeing the growing trend of bite-sized modules to come into regular educational practice.

Video-Oriented Learning

This is closely associated with the flipped classroom technique. A classroom-based learning is all about interaction and coordination among the students and teacher, regarding all the aspects they understood and those they didn’t. 

Further, the time invested at home is for the preparation of the next classroom lecture, and it mostly consists of a video of the teacher introducing the new topic and what the students can expect to learn. Apart from the flipped videos, YouTube is also a great source of authentic educational videos, and most of them never cross the 20 minutes mark. 

YouTube is not showing any signs of dropping back to a traditional style, and neither are instructors looking to slow down. So it’s safe to say the trend of video-based learning is likely to grow.

Adaptive Learning

Adaptive learning is a further in-depth style of personalized learning, and many field experts are still going through the testing phase of this technique. 

This approach allows the learner acquiring the personalized learning in a way that directs them to the mastery of a topic, and incorporate the use of big data and analytics that upgrades the learning path on regular basis. 

The purpose is served by merging the content with the instruction in real time. Even though adaptive learning is still in its infancy, but the new method is very likely to serve as a benchmark for future learning across various businesses in the educational sector.

Peer-to-peer Assessment

As it is said: human are social animals. There are times when we understand a particular topic clearly only when interacting socially with our fellow colleagues, classmates, friends, family, etc. And when a piece of information is shared within a group of people, everyone on board is given a chance to learn it equally. 

Ideally, in group learning everyone should get on the same page in terms of information gain. This will enable each learner to assess and provide help when it comes to nurturing each other’s learning process and efficiency. The peer-to-peer assessment in fact, heightens the responsibility on each student. 

Besides catering themselves, next they have is to assess and evaluate others aiding them in obtaining the required information in the same manner as everyone else does. This is a two-way process where a learner is able to help himself by observing the competence level of his/her peers, and/or at the same time help others in the same regard. 

Undoubtedly 2017 is registering more and more vendors looking to add related features in their product line to facilitate the growth of peer-to-peer assessment and learning.

Recognized Degrees of Online Courses

Colleges and universities are trying to apply online education as perfectly as possible now, where majority of their focus is to deliver a quality online learning content. 

However, the completion certificates of such online courses are still no match to a state recognized degree program offered by educational institutions. The question is: if the point concerns learning, then why are not online courses held in the same prestige and recognition as that of degree programs? Of course, colleges and universities including online education and courses in their services should promote the fact that learning should have the same level of standard, regardless of the type of courses students tend to follow. 

Even though there are quite few names to register online courses as an acceptable education medium, but further effort for their recognition will make such institutions the pioneers for future online education degrees.

Conclusion

So here we have it, the 7 top trends that promises to shape the future of online education on a whole new stage given the efforts and creative input educational institutions should provide.

For Dean—a competitive and knowledgeable M.Ed. regularly writing on the education industry, it’s all about the changing education business and the trends we need to see in order to acquire maximum learning like the option to buy a degree online and other changes in the industry of education.