Tech Trends of the Future

     The 2013 ALA LITA Top Tech Trends Panel, held in Chicago this year, highlights Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in its first segment.  After watching the presentation, it is not difficult to imagine that MOOCs will be adopted in considerable numbers in the near future in the tech world, in education, and in libraries.  The first speaker in the LITA discussion video describes the ways in which MOOCs challenge the "sequestered educational experience" often seen in the world of higher education. 

     In essence, these courses break down the barriers that, for so long, have prevented access to higher education.  To support her claim that MOOCs are on the rise, the first speaker in the LITA Panel video mentions a recent study that shows that 22% of the general public knows what the term MOOC means.  She goes on to explain that, while the general interpretation for this percentage was that it is a very low number, it is actually very high.

     It is also evident that MOOCs will become more and more prominent in the tech world as distance education becomes more and more widespread.  Finally, I also found it especially interesting when I learned from the panelist who added to the first speaker's contributions that last year (2012), Google was running its own MOOC on information literacy.  Google's MOOC ran about 100,000 people through it.  From these numbers, it is clear that MOOCs are the emerging technological trends of the future.