As an information professional, I am blown away by Ambient Insight’s market report. Their organization has taken a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to qualifying educational technologies into requisite sectors to assist their clients, the developers of educational technologies, in best marketing their services. I am particularly impressed with their leading (forecasting) and lagging indicators helping to predict trends and market shifts that have already occurred in their various markets/sectors, providing suppliers and producers with much-needed credible data to support further production or, if necessary, revision.
This product is useful to educators, learning technologies specialists and venturers in that it allows all of those parties to learn more about trends, to identify past directions, and to position themselves (either as a market or as a supplier) in various niche areas as is suitable. I can see this information being particularly useful in K-12 school divisions where either individual teachers or high-level administrators are looking to adopt new technologies, or to identify which technologies/tools they will need to prepare for based on their region. Many school divisions do not have the resources to readily investigate a variety of tools, but rather are limited to whatever may be offered on free trial or a single product available after lengthy negotiation.
The Ambient Insight reports allow instructors and administrators the ability to focus their attentions on technologies that are anticipated to be most useful in the coming year. As to those pursuing the business/venture side of education, this report is invaluable. This report provides an enormous amount of actionable, data-based market research allowing those in development to avoid reproducing existing products, to gain insight as to the markets who will be most receptive, in the sectors that will be most receptive, and allows them to identify gaps in services to create new-to-them market-spaces.
I am intimately involved in curriculum design for UBC’s undergraduate medical program, yet am frequently told that there is “no time” in daily classes for face-to-face instruction. With that in mind I have focused my energies on developing workshops, lunch & learn sessions, and hope to begin developing online modules for use at point-of-need by our students. For this reason I do anticipate seeking out future versions of this report, to identify trends in higher education, particularly as regards student use and preference in the online learning space. I anticipate other teachers will find this report useful in a variety of ways.