IN what ways, for better or for worse, will information technology actually change education in the next about five years? Think about pre-K, or K-12, or higher education, or adult education, or whatever level you wish.
Magel,
in a course we have asked ourselves exactly that question. As a result have written a book chapter about how the Internet changes education and work. Perhaps you are interested in that? If so feel free to download it from my profile. It is called "Education Reloaded - From Socrates to Udacity".
I hope you find it useful and find some answers in that.
Best,
Jan
Sparrow, Liu & Wegner (2011) have done a series of experiments and found that information technology (= the WWW) has fundamentally changed the way we deal with knowledge. In particular, they found that when people are given a trivia question, they would spontaneously think of computer-related topics. Nowadays, people also seem to better recall where they found in information than the information itself.
On the first glance, this is only remotely related to your question. However, if this is all true it has consequences on how they perform in traditional test situations (poor, because they are disconnected). It may also have more severe consequences: for example, you will never learn to speak a foreign language fluently, by knowing where to find grammar rules or vocabulary. One may either choose to adapt the education style to the cognitive style, or deliberately counteract.
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333(6043), 776–8. doi:10.1126/science.1207745
It has already changed and made it interactive. Further more moving toward e learning and more likely one will be taught using the live class room approach.
This is the subject of my dissertation. What I think that will change education globally in IT is the Raspberry Pi, I have one of these tiny computers and it is totally fab. You can do all sorts with it and even create your programmes using scratch.
If you reviewed the work done by "Salaman Khan" in http://www.khanacademy.org or "sabastian thrun" in http://udacity.com and the following coursera and edx you will find that higher education is already there and available for whatever he can collect the knowledge. for khan academy they provide the basic for children and tool for teachers to follow the performance of the children. in my personal opinion we must mix between computer based education tools and traditional way. because as martin said relying on the computer based knowledge acquisition only will lead to many disadvantages like mind laziness to remember things. and if we face tough thinking situation without computer we will surely panic.
To answer you question more directly, I would say that online (IT-based) education has taken a major shift recently in the form of MOOCs. Given that these systems are able to sustain via a sound business model, they are going to thrive day by day. I believe that it will benefit most the younger population of the third-world countries and the older population of the developed/developing world. I do not have any sound data but this what I have observed by participating in various MOOCs.
Apart from MOOCs, sites like youtube play an important role in online education.
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