Report details coming trends in campus technology

Open scholarly content will become more commonplace in higher education in the next year as online universities and textbook companies organize and harness the Internet's mass of educational material, according to a report that predicts campus technology advances within the next five years.

The 2010 Horizon Report, released this week by education technology advocacy group EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium, describes technological changes that will have the greatest impact on college students and faculty. The seventh annual report's short-term prediction focuses on open content—a trend buoyed by MIT's Open Courseware Initiative and the Open Knowledge Foundation, among others.

Rather than releasing educational material into free online repositories, some colleges and universities have embraced open content as a "social responsibility," according to the report.