ICT in Teaching and Learning

Educational Technology

Lecturers and teachers all over the world are grappling with using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for managing the quality of their teaching and their students' learning. As noted by Diane Laurillard, "The web has become established, interface design has matured, and PC access has become widespread. The demands of technological change have hindered the theory and practice of its application, however, few of the current generations of academics have ever learned through technology, so practice develops slowly and theory hardly at all" (Laurillard, 2002).

Focussing on the complex interaction between pedagogy, content and technology, Mishra and Koehler write, "...there is no single technological solution that applies for every teacher, every course, or every view of teaching. Quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content, and pedagogy, and using this understanding to develop appropriate, context-specific strategies and representations." (Mishra and Koehler, 2006)

Given the diversity of our student body with regard to, for example, level of preparedness for higher education studies, culture and language, learning technologies present Rhodes University lecturers with unique opportunities to address some of the most pressing challenges faced by Higher Education in South Africa, such as access, throughput and limited resources and facilities. For this reason, CHERTL provides academic staff with a range of learning technologies aimed at supporting their teaching and their students' learning.

RUconnected is an instance of the popular open-source learning management system (LMS), Moodle. Guided by sound pedagogical principles and social constructivist theory of learning, the LMS allows lecturers to extend interaction with students and amongst students beyond the constrains of the lecture, tutorial or practical by providing them with a range of teaching/learning resources and activities, including online forums, online submission of assignments and checking for plagiarism and online questionnaires.

In addition, CHERTL offers a facility for optical mark reader for assessment of multiple-choice question tests and capturing of quantitative research data, as well as the Evaluation Assistant, a tool for managing course and teaching evaluations. With regard to supporting research, the Centre can also provide academic staff with access to a qualitative data analysis system NVivo8.

The brief of the Academic Technologies Roundtable (ATR) is to develop and maintain a stategic planning process for creating and enabling enviroment for the thoughtful and cost-effective application of information and communication of technologies (ICTs) in teaching, learning and research at Rhodes University. In order to fulfil this brief the ATR aims to identify and formulate key issues and to recommend working structures to address these key issues through working groups who define initial goals and strategies.

Hands-on workshops on the use of RUconnected are advertised regularly on the institutional mailing list TopList while enquires and requests for academic technology support can be directed to edtech@ru.ac.za