The NMC was founded October 17, 1993 by a group of hardware manufacturers, software developers, and publishers who realized that the ultimate success of their multimedia-capable products depended upon their widespread acceptance by the higher education community in a way that had never been achieved before.
In 2003, the NMC released its first Horizon Report, that reports on which trends and technologies will drive educational change. The reports were later researched in conjunction with the Consortium for School Networking. On the right are some of the reports for the last three years, and what in these reports pertains to the effect that Gen Z students are having on teaching, and the effect that technology is having on student learning.