Future Trends in Higher Education

Course design is big, big, big business - and getting bigger all of the time! I have designed several courses for JIU, two in fact this year: EDU782 and EDU783. The instructional design department is a new phenomenon in education, especially higher education. Traditionally, professors designed their own courses, period. Now, they are losing their professional autonomy to industrialized standardization of subject matter presentation. What is powerful here is the emerging concept of the "super professor," the professor who enlists course designers to create virtual, online, mobile learning courses, training that can service thousands of students at one time! Your instincts are right. The "action" in higher education is in the emergence of course design units and the "super professor" tech application. These areas are wide-open for research, and they are on trend. They are the future - most likely. Before you drill down too deeply into social media - which is likely loaded with players already - you might want to look at these two other trends. They can employ social media; they represent the power structure that drives the future now.