Higher education is getting a makeover. The days of sitting in a desk staring at a chalkboard aren’t going away completely, but the new technology available today is opening doors for higher education all over the world. Part of this is born out of necessity, while I suspect other methods will try and fail miserably – although time will tell which methods stick and which ones fall to the wayside.

I’m always hesitant when I hear someone say that something “as we know it” is going to be completely different. That is rarely the case, if ever. Instead, it’s more likely that new doors open leveraging what we have used in the past. For instance, consider the Flipped Classroom model. Something of this nature wasn’t even possible before many of the technologies we have today. This gives students the ability to learn the material on their own time and spend classroom time discussing real-world application of the material.

MOOCs are also in much of the higher education chatter, and for good reason. Never before has it been possible to reach thousands upon thousands of learners at the same time, who in turn help each other learn. And the price is right as well. However, this is one area that I suspect many universities will jump-on initially, but it may fall out of favor over time (especially if not done properly).

This infographic provided by the University of Phoenix, details these two advances in higher ed, along with various other trends and fashionable technologies. Although much of this is speculation (as is anything that attempts to predict the future), I find that seeing what companies/universities are using various strategies is encouraging. For instance, the projection that in two years we will see more learner analytics is certainly starting to become a reality – especially with the advent of TinCan API.

As always, it’s going to be fascinating to see the evolution of higher education given these new tools. Like most cases, we’ll probably see some of these combined in ways never thought of before to form a really useful offering to faculty and students. Or, even more likely, we’ll see a few of these adopted in some capacity to supplement the proven methodology. There is nothing wrong with this approach either – there is no rule stating that “new” must replace “old” in order to be useful.