The Future of Higher Education - 11

Part 3: Technology and Education
requires a continuous research agenda in order
to keep up with. Most of that innovation occurs
in the commercial, not educational realm, which
requires a broader study. Meanwhile, academics'
technology use steadily grows, spiked ahead by
COVID-19, which means campus IT must monitor
that usage and maintain personal relationships.
Academic interest usually grows, overall, adding
more usage and rarely subtracting any. At
the same time campus computing units also
struggle to hire and retain professional staff,
given that academic compensation is not usually
competitive with what the private sector can
offer.
OPEN EDUCATION AND OPEN ACCESS
One particular technology - or rather, a way of
using technology - offers the potential to save
faculty, staff, and students money. This is the
open content idea, which takes two forms. Open
educational resources (OER) are, depending
on one's definition, free or low-cost, broadly
or universally available, and capable of being
repurposed and remixed. They are alternatives
to textbooks, the prices of which have soared.
OER often takes digital forms as pdfs, web
pages, podcasts, or videos. The concept dates
back decades, and OER development has
been occurring every year, with more and
better content appearing. Already there are " Z "
programs and degrees, where " Z " stands for
" zero materials cost. " It is difficult to get solid
statistics about OER usage on the ground, but
we can safely say that faculty awareness of the
materials has been growing as has the amount
of materials available. At some point, we should
expect the majority of student textbook needs to
be met by OER.
A related development is open access (OA) in
scholarly materials, primarily articles as well
as monographs. OA offers to expand scholarly,
student, and popular access to research by
publishing without paywalls (as with textbooks,
scholarly content prices have also soared). The
mechanisms for making this work have become
quite complex, with a range of systems in play
stretching from faculty doing DIY content hosting
to otherwise paywall-using publishers setting up
their own versions of OA. As with OER, we may
see OA become the format through which the
majority of scholarly content appears.
EXTENDED REALITY
OER and OA are not based on brand-new
technologies, but build upon existing ones. In
contrast, two emerging technologies are starting
to impact the academic space. Extended reality
(XR) is a combination of augmented reality (AR)
(which ties digital data to the physical world, as
with Google Maps or Pokémon Go on a mobile
device) with virtual reality (VR), which creates a
virtual world we can experience in isolation from
the rest of the world. Both VR and AR have been
developing for decades; their combination is
only now starting to appear. Microsoft's HoloLens
and the Magic Leap headset offer versions of
XR, as they map digital content onto one's
immediate physical environment. Digital objects
appear throughout one's office or living room,
for example, and users can interact with them
through voice commands, hand gestures, or
handheld controllers. Apple's forthcoming Vision
Pro offers similar features. Given that company's
enormous reach and fanbase, this hardware
might win a large audience.
XR has a great deal of academic potential. It can
offer visualizations and immersive experiences
at new levels. It may be able to make virtual
collaboration more powerful than the tools we
use now-indeed, some users have found XR
Part 3: Technology and Education
Part 1: The Global Context
8
The Future of Higher Education

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Future of Higher Education
