The report was published in April 2016 and focuses on higher education particularly for STEM fields. “The report”, the authors argue, “digresses into deeper and broader examination of learning, and makes recommendations about online learning in that context”. Four main recommendations are indicated:

• Recommendation 01. Increase Interdisciplinary Collaboration Across Fields of Research in Higher Education, Using an Integrated Research Agenda: look for the convergence between outside-in approach and the inside-out approach in education.

• Recommendation 02: Promote Online as an Important Facilitator in Higher Education: customized learning, remote collaboration, just-in-time scenarios, continuous assessment and blended learning.
• Recommendation 03: Support the Expanding Profession of the Learning Engineer: a “learning engineer” is a creative professional who helps build bridges between fields of education and develops additional infrastructure to help teachers teach and students learn.
• Recommendation 04: Foster Institutional and Organizational Change in Higher Education to Implement These Reforms: creation of thinking communities, identification and development of change agents and role models, groups and not individual visionaries.

Despite these most interesting suggestions what I value most about this report is found in the following image:

What this illustration intends to high light is the need to correlate these three separate disciplines. As the authors say, “only the coming together of these three components would ever have a major impact on education”. Now I have been looking into this matter for a long time and I too strongly advocate for this option. For more check older May posts.

Image available here