Emerging educational technologies in higher educational institutions: The current trends and impacts from Thailand universities’ perspectives

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Skonchai Chanunan

Abstract

The provision of appropriate educational technologies can be an advantage of higher education institutions in terms of marketing, or branding,
and for managing and supporting students’ learning. These kinds of technologies evolve rapidly, and it is therefore sensible for educational
institutions to explore the impact of innovative (or emerging) technologies prior to their broad adoption by the mainstream in order to create
an early competitive advantage. The purpose of this research was to examine the current trends and impacts of emerging educational
technologies that are expected to be in most higher education institutions. In this research, the information extracted from the literature was
collected through a scoping literature review. In addition, the Technology Hype Cycle by the Gartner group was employed for identifying the
emerging key technologies for education. In addition to the literature review, the interviews were carried out as semi-structured conversations
with ten university lecturers from different universities across Thailand to find out the current trends of using and impacts of emerging
educational technologies on teaching, learning and creative inquiry in higher education. The results from the literature review part suggest
that there are twelve emerging educational technologies which can be grouped into four sets representing the current trends in educational
technology development which are: 1) multimode or multichannel technologies for learning, 2) social learning technologies, 3) cloud-based
learning technologies and, 4) ICT interoperability. However, according to the results from the interviews with Thailand university lecturers, it
is suggested that seven emerging educational technologies which are 1) open source learning repositories, 2) social learning platforms, 3) cloud
email, 4) EMNS, 5) learning stack, 6) unified communication and collaboration technologies, and 7) student retention CRM, now have profound
impacts and the impact will be more in the near future and need more development to suit their current work. From the analysis, these
emerging technologies are appropriate for the context of Thai universities in terms of project budgets, manpower, and time constraints.



Keywords: Emerging educational technologies; the technology Hype-Cycle; Thailand universities’ perspectives.

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How to Cite
Chanunan, S. (2017). Emerging educational technologies in higher educational institutions: The current trends and impacts from Thailand universities’ perspectives. New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 4(1), 89–103. https://doi.org/10.18844/prosoc.v4i1.2239
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