We've seen a lot of reporting coming out of this year's EDUCAUSE conference. In this report, Joshua Kim says that this year's conference felt different than previous events - and that the Gates Foundation is the reason. Below, some language from this brief report. Here's a link to the Next Generation Learning Challenge website. Planners need to pay attention - this could be a major turning point in, for example, online learning.

This EDUCAUSE Conference has felt different from all the rest, and the reason I think is Gates Foundation Next Generation Learning Challenges. This is the first EDUCAUSE Conference that I've attended where there is a real feeling of confidence that information technology can be the lever for structural change in our higher ed system.

The real power of the Gates Next Generation Learning Challenge is not the money, although that helps, but the ability to focus the problems in higher education around a defined set of issues. Gates has us all speaking the same language. In talking with Cameron Evans (Microsoft), Ray Henderson (Blackboard), and Don Kilburn (Pearson), the conversation kept coming back to the role that their companies can play in addressing the issues that have been identified by Gates.

Leadership from technology, LMS, and publishing companies are now all focused on utilizing the power of their companies to work on the specific issues that the Next Generation Learning Challenges are designed to address.

We all know by now that with the higher ed realm leadership of Mark Milliron, the Gates Foundation is investing big in our future. Here's an interview with the person who is directing the educational technology push to be announced yet this fall, in partnership with EDUCAUSE and others:

Q: You’ve teamed with Educause, the college IT group, to start a program called Next Gen Learning Challenges. Describe the project.

A: What we envision is a multiyear, multiwave program, where every six to 12 months we issue a new set of challenges. And we’ll issue a set of challenges this fall around shared open-core courseware, around learning analytics, around blended learning, and around new, deeper forms of learning and engagement using interactive technologies. There’s a big gap between R&D and high-impact solutions at scale. We’re trying to participate in some of the effort to help those most promising solutions get across that chasm.

 

Q: What are the big challenges you see in online education?

A: Breaking down this division between online education and education. Increasingly, we’re bringing digital assets and digital experiences into the traditional classroom or at home. One of the big challenges is the reunification, if you will, of online learning with offline learning. And creating these blended contexts, which, based on the U.S. Department of Education meta-study and other work, seem to be the place where it’s not an either or, it’s trying to figure out how to do the best of both.

Secondly, given some of he conversations in Washington and other places around for-profit education, there’s a real danger that we overlap the actions of the bad actors in the for-profit sector with all of the for-profit sector, and overlap all the for-profit sector with all of online learning in general and all strategies that might be different and innovative. There’s a real risk that in looking at some bad actions within the for-profit sector, that we take a step backwards from some of the innovative strategies that institutions are using.