Education report highlights challenges of complex learning environments

This year’s future of education report highlights 10 promising innovations facing learners and educators over the coming years.

The Innovating Pedagogy 2023 report, produced by academics in The Open University's (OU) Institute of Educational Technology and the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, focuses on the challenges where learning takes place across a combination of physical and virtual spaces.

This is the 11^th report in a series co-produced by the OU which researches innovations in teaching, learning and assessment.

The reports are intended for teachers, policy makers, academics, students, researchers, designers of educational technology, and for anyone who is interested in pedagogical innovation and how education is changing.

In her introduction to the report, lead author, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, OU Professor of Learning Technology and Communication, says:

“This year we have ‘pedagogies using AI tools, ‘relational pedagogies’ and ‘entangled pedagogies of learning spaces’, along with approaches highlighting entrepreneurship and education in the Metaverse.”

She also jokes that the authors were briefly tempted to ask ChatGPT to write the report but (happily), it is not capable of doing so.

The potential for ChatGPT, the best-known Generative AI tool, to change educational practice is discussed in the section on Pedagogies using AI tools, as well as raising many issues that will need to be addressed, not least, the possibility of students handing in work generated by these tools.

The other nine trends are:

• Challenge based learning

  Rising to challenges to benefit individuals and societies

• Multimodal pedagogy

  Enhancing learning by diversifying communication and representation

• Entrepreneurial education

  Students as change agents in society

• Metaverse for education

  Educational opportunities through fully immersive 3D environments

• Seeing yourself in the curriculum

  Pedagogies enabling students to see themselves in the curriculum

• Podcasts as pedagogy

  Embedding podcasts in teaching and learning practices

• Entangled pedagogies of learning spaces

  Connecting technology, pedagogy and all elements of a learning context

• Pedagogy of care in digitally mediated settings

  Prioritising the well-being and development of students

• Relational pedagogies

  Working relationally in and across disciplinary and professional boundaries

Commenting on the overall report, Professor Kukulska-Hulme said:

“All this seems to represent what can be described as a trend towards “a multiplicity of technologies, methods and modalities” available for a learning experience, meaning that several media and modes of communication and delivery can support teaching, learning and assessment across a range of contexts and spaces.

“It makes for a potentially complex teaching and learning environment where student activity needs to be ‘orchestrated’, as explained in our section on ‘Entangled pedagogies of learning spaces’ in this report. It has, however, the advantage of offering more options to suit different circumstances and student needs and it can support combining formal teaching and independent or informal learning.“