Contemporary and future eLearning trends in medical education

What follows is a consideration of three current eLearning trends – Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), tablet computing, and learning analytics – and a discussion as to whether these trends might disrupt what Ellaway sees as a period of consolidation in medical eLearning (Ellaway 2011). The eLearning innovations that we consider are taken from the NMC Horizon Report: 2013 Higher Education Edition, a wellknown series of publications which looks at how technologies might impact on education in the short, medium, and long term. The 2013 report identifies MOOCs, tablet computing, and learning analytics as potentially having a significant impact on education (Johnson et al. 2013). In our view, each trend has the potential to bring about changes in medical education. However, if the three trends come together, then there may be a single force for change that could be significant for medical education. We will explore this idea and critically discuss the issues in the final section of the paper.