Dive Brief:
- GettingSmart.com profiles several areas of tech engagement that will help to attract and retain students in a climate where enrollment may shrink due to high costs and waning confidence in higher education.
- Officials say education should become more personalized through distance learning and tutoring systems, virtual learning environments which can help with professional development, and gamification to induce increased participation from diverse student populations.
- Microlearning, or reducing traditional lectures into smaller video tutorials, may also prove to be a change agent in keeping students' attention and improving learning outcomes.
Dive Insight:
College leaders nationwide are bringing more technology to the classroom and engaging more students to take courses online as a means to boosting recruitment and retention, and at schools like Middle Tennessee State University, the investments are paying off. But colleges can do a much better job of showing how these advancements make education worth the cost of admission, or how they connect learners with better opportunities for careers or advanced degrees.
It is not enough to say that students are better served learning curriculum through VR goggles or in virtual classrooms if the costs and the information are the same as they have always been. How is education shifting with technology to make a degree something that enlightens and empowers those who earn it? That is the question academic executives and faculty members have to answer for incoming students over the next five years.
