If we thought 2020 brought on a rapid change in the eLearning industry, 2021 has cemented those changes and added even more for teachers and students to navigate. Quick pivots and on-the-fly eLearning adaptation were necessary for the first weeks and months of the pandemic, but it’s clear now that few learning environments will go back to being solely in-person, even if COVID-19 disappears for good.

As we enter 2022 and continue to see eLearning accelerate in K-12 schools and higher education institutions alike, there are three trends we expect to see in 2022 for student and teacher successes.

Chart the Destination and How You’ll Get There

In an NPR interview in spring 2021, a high school English teacher from New Hampshire said teaching “feels like we’re building the plane while we’re flying it and the destination keeps changing on us.” In-person, remote, and hybrid instruction all have unique challenges, and teachers made do with what they had in 2020.

This year, however, has been equally if not more challenging for teachers. Not only are they expected to run in-person classrooms flawlessly amidst changing COVID-19 protocols, they are also expected to seamlessly integrate virtual learning into that same environment or revert back to fully remote or in-person as needed. All that with little instruction or assistance in how to embrace the sometimes hastily built technology they’re expected to use for each of these environments.

In one form or another, eLearning is here to stay. So, it is imperative to upskill in-person education professionals to be successful in an online environment. Being a good instructor in person doesn’t necessarily mean you have the tools and skills needed to translate that instruction online, or into a hybrid environment. Schools must make eLearning training available for their teachers by charting a clear end goal with specific benchmarks of comfort and fluency, just as those teachers are expected to create for their students.

Embrace AI

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere and talked about in every tech sector. What’s more, it’s predicted to grow 47% in the education market by 2023 alone. If institutions are using eLearning solutions, they need to be incorporating AI for their students and instructors, as well.

We most frequently hear about AI with automation, but it’s not just assembly lines that can benefit. AI can automate basic and repetitive eLearning activities like grading multiple-choice quizzes that provide the learner with their results immediately with real-time learner progress. AI can also provide instructors with real-time progress by monitoring student journeys and alerting their educators when a student’s performance is lagging behind. Overall this provides greater analytical insights because AI abolishes the need for teachers to work across static data sets or manually gauge progress.

AI can also enhance the most engaging way students and teachers learn online: Gamification.

Make a Game of It

Regardless of whether it’s upskilling teachers in their eLearning proficiencies or teaching kids algebra and language arts, gamification bolsters engagement and knowledge retention. This is nothing new — gamified learning like quiz bowls and spelling bees predate online learning (the first Scripps National Spelling Bee was held in 1925).

Elearning presents even more opportunities for gamified experiences than in-person learning. Features like achievements, behavioral rewards for participation and position tracking relative to course averages are all automated metrics AI can track for learners and educators. Some AI tracking features don’t look like gamification on the surface, but the progress tracking was very much adapted from the realm of game design. More obvious game design principles like reward feedback loops provide encouragement and a sense of achievement and can be structured as literal achievements for completing objectives. The more satisfying each new milestone’s reward, the more invested learners tend to become.

This isn’t reserved just for academia. A recent study of corporate learning environments found a 50%+ increase from prior engagement levels with the use of gamified tactics. This increased engagement also led to increased fluency with course materials and often, a faster learning curve for each participant. Gamification isn’t just fun — it’s a proven benefit!

These aren’t the only trends we can expect to see in 2022, but they are the trends that will continue to revolutionize online learning for children and adults alike. We must ensure teachers are comfortable with the eLearning products they’re using so they can fully deploy AI and gamification to provide better, more seamless online learning environments for their students.

Phill Miller is based in Indianapolis and is the Managing Director for Open LMS, the world’s largest open-source LMS provider.

Featured Image: Julia M Cameron, Pexels. 

The post 2022 eLearning Trends: Supporting Students and Teachers appeared first on eLearningInside News.

For education to be successful in transforming our global community, it must be accessible – and that is what open-source technologies bring to the world of learning. By definition, open-source software has freely available code that can be redistributed and modified without limitation. Unlike closed-source software, which does not share its code and must be licensed, open-source software alleviates one of the most pressing barriers to education across the globe: cost.

Editor’s note: The terms ‘open’ and ‘open-source’ are controversial. Developers and vendors use them to denote a variety of meanings. In many cases, open source software does carry a lower net cost than proprietary alternatives. But that is not always the case. Click here to read more about the varying degrees of ‘open-ness’ and examples of open-washing.

At the forefront in the open source education space has been Moodle™, which, since its inception in 2002, has helped revolutionize the education space as we know it by providing educators with a free tool to support learning in various forms. At the time of writing, there are almost 260 million users on over 180,000 registered Moodle™ sites across the globe relying on this platform to power their initiatives. This is exponentially more users and institutions than use any other platform.  For many, this would not be possible if it were not open source.

As an open-source platform, Moodle™ allows organizations and institutions to host the software themselves or partner with one of the many Moodle™ experts in the education technology space, like Open LMS, to grow their online learning presence and experiment creatively with how they can present information and education opportunities to their learners.  This flexibility simply doesn’t exist with proprietary platforms.

In short, this openness in education makes education accessible to more learners worldwide and it also encourages product development at a faster rate that is in tune with the market’s needs. That said, openness as a value in education has become more important than ever, especially in the last year, as many organizations and institutions had to bring learning online in order to continue providing important resources and learning opportunities to their constituents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Do You Have to Be 100% Open to Be Considered Open?

However, there is a lot of muddiness in the LMS space about what open source actually means. Many organizations provide enhancements and some proprietary code that serve as unique elements that add more value for users, but that small portion of code not being fully open-source does not affect the ability for anyone to use, launch, or expand on its core offering.

It is easy to demonize organizations that do not open source every piece of their code, but I believe that only serves to discourage organizations from open-sourcing any of their code. In order to put the time and effort into creating and maintaining that open-source code, the truth is that organizations still need to make money, which often comes from additional services and elements that may not be included in their open-source offerings. As a global learning community, it is much more beneficial to encourage all groups to participate in the open-source project in any way they are able. This culture will truly pay dividends for the larger open-source community, which will be able to leverage and build from these contributions.

⭐After a successful close to the first quarter, we continue momentum in the #LMS market with a new strategic direction. https://t.co/UOElszjv6d#edtech #elearning #edtechchat #onlinelearning #education #digitallearning #thefutureoflearning

— Open LMS (@Open_LMS) April 20, 2021

The impact of open technology has been clear in the way the community has rallied together to share new ways to address our common challenges and celebrate learning success stories during the pandemic. The extremely diverse and ever-growing communities that support open-source technologies are full of people who are passionate about learning, educational experimentation, and – most importantly – the success of learners.

In these communities, individuals and organizations share eLearning best practices, contribute improvements to software code, push forward functionality that addresses a variety of market needs, and problem solve with others to improve education opportunities across the globe. In this way, open source encourages a grassroots method of improving education accessibility by making software and code improvements freely available alongside a variety of support resources like forums, blogs, how-to videos, and other resources that are created and maintained by an open community.

Personally, it is an honor for me to be a small part of this community. I am incredibly proud to have worked for and with companies who have given so much to the cause of championing open-source technologies and have made it part of their mission to continue to further projects to improve technology not only for their clients, but for the world. We, as members of the eLearning community, have a duty to participate in and contribute towards open-source learning technology projects. Our responsibility remains to the global community that relies on open-source technologies to continue to make sure that they are successful in their teaching, learning, and development goals.

What Does It Mean for Us to Participate in the Open-Source Community?

For us at Open LMS, it means open-sourcing more of our code than we have in the past several years. Though our solutions are all based on open-source Moodle™ and we have continuously participated in the project, we have not had a focus on open-sourcing our unique code. That is something we have dedicated to do more this year by progressively releasing all of our code for our products, including Open LMS Work, which includes unique features designed with workplace learners in mind.

Open sourcing our code is a labor of love, and not one that is without additional work. You may think, “Well, you just need to release it right?” But it actually takes significant time and dedication for our team to separate the code, provide resources and documentation so that people know what that code can do, maintain relationships with the community using the code, and more. When an organization takes the step to open source their code, they are making a commitment to dedicate working hours to serving a global community that expands far past their paying customers because they feel called to increase the accessibility of software and to help more users reap the benefits of open-source technologies.

Possibly most importantly, we and the whole learning community need to continue to focus on and encourage the push for more accessibility within education and the technology and learning content that supports it. Openness goes far beyond code access. Openness is about ensuring equality and availability of learning opportunities and that is the root of why open-source software is so important. Open-source software allows people across the globe to push the boundaries of what could be achieved and how learning opportunities can be brought to more learners.

Participating and engaging in the open-source community is a value that is shared not only across Open LMS’s leadership and employees, but broadly across our parent company Learning Technologies Group (LTG) and its leadership. Recently, Open LMS has merged with two additional powerhouse teams, allowing us to expand our collective knowledge and ultimately the benefit we can provide to our clients and the whole open-source education technology community. We have a strong desire to be a force for good in this community and to continue to push forward the open-source mission of our organization and other education technologies. We can be that force and so we will, and I invite you to be a part of it too.

Phill Miller is the managing director at Open LMS.

Featured Image: Hans Isaacson, Unsplash.

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