The Top 10 IT Issues and the Future of Learning Logistics

The EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues list is no exception. This list tells an interesting story that reflects the collective concerns of the higher education IT community. However, the 2018 list tells this story differently. For me, the story is not about what's on the list but, rather, what's not. It's important to recognize that we have hit a saturation point where teaching and learning has reached such a level of strategic importance that putting it on a list of things to worry about seems to somehow downgrade its importance -- as if it is simply one more to-do item on the IT grocery list of issues. "Let's put transforming learning on the list -- right below milk, eggs, and bread." For generations, the basic structure of higher education has been divided into courses -- each a combination of faculty, students, classrooms, and textbooks. This combination is replicated as an independent transaction with students thousands of times, with a rinsing-and-repeating between semesters.