Emerging educational technologies in higher educational institutions: The current trends and impacts from Thailand universities’ perspectives

Abstract

The provision of appropriate educational technologies can be an advantage of higher education institutions in terms of marketing, or branding, and for managing and supporting students' learning. These kinds of technologies evolve rapidly, and it is therefore sensible for educational institutions to explore the impact of innovative (or emerging) technologies prior to their broad adoption by the mainstream in order to create an early competitive advantage. The purpose of this research was to examine the current trends and impacts of emerging educational technologies that are expected to be in most higher education institutions. In this research, the information extracted from the literature was collected through a scoping literature review. In addition, the Technology Hype Cycle by the Gartner group was employed for identifying the emerging key technologies for education. In addition to the literature review, the interviews were carried out as semi-structured conversations with ten university lecturers from different universities across Thailand to find out the current trends of using and impacts of emerging educational technologies on teaching, learning and creative inquiry in higher education. The results from the literature review part suggest that there are twelve emerging educational technologies which can be grouped into four sets representing the current trends in educational technology development which are: 1) multimode or multichannel technologies for learning, 2) social learning technologies, 3) cloud-based learning technologies and, 4) ICT interoperability. However, according to the results from the interviews with Thailand university lecturers, it is suggested that seven emerging educational technologies which are 1) open source learning repositories, 2) social learning platforms, 3) cloud email, 4) EMNS, 5) learning stack, 6) unified communication and collaboration technologies, and 7) student retention CRM, now have profound impacts and the impact will be more in the near future and need more development to suit their current work. From the analysis, these emerging technologies are appropriate for the context of Thai universities in terms of project budgets, manpower, and time constraints.

Institutionalizing Technologies in South African Universities towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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