Education 1.

0: a one-way process
Since the establishment of ‘modern’ universities, students have attended a physical place in order to be
at university. The campus (from the Latin for ‘field’) and its buildings are important. Education 1.0
students received information supplied in the form of a ‘stand-up’ routine from a member of academic
staff, often lecture-dominated, perhaps with handouts and textbooks.

Hence, in Higher Education 1.0 students were consumers of information and resources that were
transmitted to them for their study. Assessment was typically exam based. Only if students became
researchers, later in their academic careers, then the results of their activities contributed back to the
knowledge corpus

Education 1.5: expand and digitalise

During the 20th Century, opportunities for people to gain a higher education increased with a very sharp
acceleration in many countries from the 1960s. The ‘massification’ and the much greater diversity of
students challenged traditional structures and ways of teaching. Large educational innovations such as
the UK Open University were established and grew. Funding regimes started to change and for the first
time discussions began on ‘students as customers’.

From around 20 years ago, Education 1.5 arrived, and Learning Management Systems/Virtual Learning
Environments (LMS/VLEs) with their aspirations and myths grew in popularity. Educators started
enhancing the face-to-face experiences with digital resources…whilst still essentially driven by the
‘transmission’ paradigm of teaching. LMSs/VLEs, provided by vendors external to the university, enabled
the digital part of what was now called blended learning. The LMSs/VLEs are now used by millions of
students and academic staff across the world, dominated by a few big suppliers. There’s a similar
continuum for distance and remote learning via print, videos, digital, and mobile resources. By the way,
MOOCS didn’t invent entirely online learning — it has been used since the 1990s.

Education 2.0: social connections and contributions

By around 2005, there was discussion about Web 2.0 and recognition that Web services increasingly
enabled people to interact and collaborate as creators of ‘user-generated content’ in virtual
communities of interest…enter blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, Web applications
(apps), and mashups.

The impact of Web 2.0 is encapsulated by Time magazine naming ‘you’ (that is, content creators on the
internet) as the 2006 Person of the Year

The nature of students and their expectations started to shift. Most students worked as well as studied
and needed highly flexible learning opportunities. Education started to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to
enhance and challenge traditional approaches to education. Open Educational Resources and crowd-
contributed content (like Wikipedia) enabled different approaches to more information and knowledge.
Some groundwork was done towards student-centred change.

A great example of Education 2.0 is the ‘flipped classroom’. This means moving information transfer out
of the lecture room — often for students to access and work on themselves — and then assimilation,
contextualising, making meaning and working together shifts to activities during precious campus-based
time. As mobile technologies and much better integration becomes possible, flipping has attracted a lot
of interest and experimentation.

In the last ten years, the internet has become an integral thread of the tapestries of most societies. The
Web influences many people’s way of thinking, doing and being. People constantly contribute and
reinvent its development and content. The internet of 2017 has become a portal into human
perceptions, thinking, and behavior of every shade.
Future citizens and users of Web 3.0 — and many of today’s higher education students — have grown
up in a world that has always had the internet. Students and educators alike are increasingly mobile
device dependent.

So maybe Education 3.0 will be characterized by rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational

opportunities, where the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge, artefacts are
shared, and social networking and social benefits outside the immediate scope of the core university
activity play a strong role. The distinction between things, people and process becomes blurred and
many boundaries start to break down.
Source: https://www.gillysalmon.com/blog/higher-education-3-0-and-beyond