Educational technology stretches back quite a few years. Consider these milestones. Special thanks to EDUCAUSE which has a longer version of this list of milestones.

1998: Wikis -

• The wiki—a web page that could be jointly edited by anyone—was a fundamental shift in how we related to the internet. The web democratized publishing, and the wiki made the process a collaborative, shared enterprise.

1999: E-Learning

• E-learning had been in use as a term for some time by 1999, but the rise of the web and the prefix of "e" to everything saw it come to prominence.

2000: Learning Objects

• "a digitized entity which can be used, reused or referenced during technology supported learning."

2001: E-learning Standards

• Enter e-learning standards and, in particular, IMS. This was the body that set about to develop standards that would describe content, assessment tools, courses, and more ambitiously, learning design. SCORM became an industry standard in specifying content that could be used in virtual learning environments (VLEs).

2002: Open Educational Resources (OER)

• In 2001, MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative, marking the initiation of the OER movement. But it was in 2002 that the first OER were released and that people began to understand licenses
• The OPL proved to be one of the key components, along with the Free Software Foundation's GNU license, of the Creative Commons licenses, developed by Larry Lessig and others in 2002. These went on to become essential in the open-education movement. The simple licenses in Creative Commons allowed users to easily share resources, and OER became a global movement.

2003: Blogs

• Blogging developed alongside the more education-specific developments and was then co-opted into edtech. Once people realized that anyone could publish on the web, they inevitably started to publish diaries, journals, and regularly updated resources. Blogging emerged from a simple version of "here's my online journal" when syndication became easy to implement. The advent of feeds, and particularly the universal standard RSS, provided a means for readers to subscribe to anyone's blog and receive regular updates.

2004: The Learning Management System/ Course Management System

• The learning management system (LMS) offered an enterprise solution for e-learning providers. It stands as the central e-learning technology. Prior to the LMS, e-learning provision was realized through a variety of tools: a bulletin board for communications; a content-management system; and/or home-created web pages.

2005: YouTube and Video Sharing Services

• YouTube and other video-sharing services flourished, and the realization that anyone could make a video and share it easily was the next step in the broadcast democratization that had begun with HTML. While the use of video in education was often restricted to broadcast, this was a further development on the learning objects idea. As the success of the Khan Academy illustrates, simple video explanations of key concepts—explanations that can be shared and embedded easily—met a great educational demand.

2006: Web 2.0

• The practical term "web 2.0" gathered together the user-generated content services, including YouTube, Flickr, and blogs. But it was more than just a useful term for a set of technologies; it seemed to capture a new mindset in our relation to the internet.

2007: Second Life and Virtual Worlds

• Online virtual worlds and Second Life had been around for some time, with Second Life launching in 2003, but they begin to see an upsurge in popularity around 2007. Colleges and universities began creating their own islands, and whole courses were delivered through Second Life.

2008: ePortfolios

• The e-portfolio was a place to store all the evidence a learner gathered to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, in order to support lifelong learning and career development. But like learning objects—and despite academic interest and a lot of investment in technology and standards—e-portfolios did not become the standard form of assessment as proposed.

2009: Twitter and Social Media

• Founded in 2006, Twitter had moved well beyond the tech-enthusiast bubble by 2009. In 2009, though, the ability to make global connections, to easily cross disciplines, and to engage in meaningful discussion all before breakfast was revolutionary. There was also a democratizing effect: formal academic status was not significant, since users were judged on the value of their contributions to the network. In educational terms, social media has done much to change the nature of the relationship between academics, students, and the institution.

2010: Connectivism

• The early enthusiasm for e-learning saw a number of pedagogies resurrected or adopted to meet the new potential of the digital, networked context. Constructivism, problem-based learning, and resource-based learning all saw renewed interest as educators sought to harness the possibility of abundant content and networked learners.
• Yet connectivism, as proposed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2004–2005, could lay claim to being the first internet-native learning theory. Siemens defined connectivism as "the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements—not entirely under the control of the individual."

2011: Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) were an outcome of the proliferation of services that suddenly became available following the web 2.0 boom. Learners and educators began to gather a set of tools to realize a number of functions. In edtech, the conversation turned to whether these tools could be somehow "glued" together in terms of data. Instead of talking about one LMS provided to all students, we were discussing how each learner had his/her own particular blend of tools.

2012: MOOCs

• Inevitably, 2012 will be seen as the year of MOOCs. In many ways the MOOC phenomenon can be viewed as the combination of several preceding technologies: some of the open approach of OER, the application of video, the experimentation of connectivism, and the revolutionary hype of web 2.0.

2013: Open Textbooks

• Open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, free for the digital version. The cost of textbooks provided a motivation for adoption, and the switching of costs from production to purchase offers a viable model. As with LMSs, open textbooks offer an easy route to adoption.

2014: Learning Analytics

• What are students doing when logged in online to your system

2015: Digital Badges

• Providing digital badges for achievements that can be verified and linked to evidence started with Mozilla's open badge infrastructure in 2011. Like many other edtech developments, digital badges had an initial flurry of interest from devotees but then settled into a pattern of more laborious long-term acceptance. They represent a combination of key challenges for educational technology: realizing easy-to-use, scalable technology; developing social awareness that gives them currency; and providing the policy and support structures that make them valuable.

2016: The Return of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• The concern about AI is not that it won't deliver on the promise held forth by its advocates but, rather, that someday it will. And then the assumptions embedded in code will shape how education is realized, and if learners don't fit that conceptual model, they will find themselves outside of the area in which compassion will allow a human to alter or intervene.