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• 1998: Wikis
◦ Wikis, invented by Ward Cunningham in 1994, were just breaking through in 1998.
• 1999: E-Learning
◦ By 1999, "e-learning" was becoming mainstream, with conventional and distance colleges and universities adopting e-learning programs.
• 2000: Learning Objects
◦ Derived from computer science's object-oriented programming, learning objects were conceived as reusable, clearly defined pieces of educational content -
• 2001: E-learning Standards
◦ Growing interest in e-learning drove efforts to build platforms, create content, and share tools.
• 2002: Open Educational Resources (OER)
◦ The OER movement began with MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, and the first OERs were released in 2002.
• 2003: Blogs
◦ Blogging, an obvious extension of the web, developed alongside and was co-opted into edtech, foreshadowing Web 2.0. -
• 2004: The LMS
◦ The Learning Management System (LMS) offered an enterprise solution for e-learning, centralizing various tools (bulletin boards, content management, web pages) that were previously fragmented and variable in quality.
• 2005: Video
◦ YouTube was founded in 2005, marking a point where improved internet access and compression made streaming video viable.
• 2006: Web 2.0
◦ The "web 2.0" tag, popularized by Tim O'Reilly, penetrated educational usage around 2006. -
• 2007: Second Life and Virtual Worlds
◦ Second Life and other online virtual worlds saw an upsurge in popularity around 2007.
• 2008: E-Portfolios
◦ E-portfolios were conceived as a place to store evidence of formal and informal learning.
• 2009: Twitter and Social Media
◦ By 2009, Twitter had moved beyond early adopters, seen as a tool for global connections.
• 2010: Connectivism
◦ Proposed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2004–2005. -
• 2011: PLE (Personal Learning Environments)
◦ PLEs emerged from the proliferation of services after the Web 2.0 boom, where learners and educators gathered a personalized set of tools.
• 2012: MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)
• 2013: Open Textbooks
◦ An extension of the OER movement, open textbooks provided openly licensed, bespoke written textbooks free in digital versions.
• 2014: Learning Analytics
• 2015: Digital Badges -
OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, quickly reaching millions of users.
Within months, schools, universities, and edtech platforms integrated or adapted policies around AI tools, making ChatGPT one of the most influential technologies in shaping modern learning practices. However, there are still significant limitations and risks associated with modern AI systems, including issues of transparency, interpretability, generalization failures, and the perpetuation of biases.