You can now register for the 2020 Teaching and Learning with Technology Day

Date: Thursday, 26th of November 2020, 9.00-15.30
Location: online

Theme: Staff and student experiences of Remote Teaching and Learning during times of disruption – lessons learnt for an unknown future

COVID-19 has challenged institutions of higher learning to rethink the way they teach and how their students learn. CPUT like other institutions nationally and as mandated by government, adopted a multi-modal approach to teaching and learning using the carousel model in order to make sure that no student would be left behind. Over the last eight months, CPUT and its stakeholders gained invaluable experiences in supporting teaching and learning remotely. What were your experiences with RTL? What was made possible? What challenges did you encounter? In terms of student access? How did you handle security and privacy of student data? What inequalities were highlighted? How will these experiences impact on the future of higher education? Should we/can we go back to the way we taught before, or are we going to see more uptake of blended learning or fully online teaching and learning in the future?

The event will feature both staff and students’ reflection on their experiences with multi-modal learning during lockdown and suggest ways we can use the lessons learnt for planning for 2021 and beyond. They will share specific tools and technologies they used and specific pedagogical interventions that worked particularly well for their students’ teaching, learning and assessment.

To book your place please use our online registration form

For more information and the programme see https://blogs.cput.ac.za/edutech/2020-teaching-and-learning-with-technology-day/

Introduction

The shift to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (RTL) during the COVID 19 pandemic has forced lecturers to use online platforms such as Blackboard, Teams and other Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as WhatsApp.  The rapid change has been unsettling as lecturers anxiously tried to reach their students online. Lecturers had to revisit their teaching methods and focus on creating an online social presence through various activities such as short videos, podcasts, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, and peer and collaborative learning opportunities. Feedback from students shows that they adapted their learning and had to apply different learning strategies.  In the process, challenges and questions arose about the ethics of teaching online.   

Mutual engagement and interaction

Supportive engagement and interaction were essential to lecturers’ online teaching. They paid attention to establishing relations of care and trust with their students.  Feedback from students shows that most lecturers tried to create a caring and nurturing learning environment online. According to the students, lecturers played a supportive role in setting the proper tone and atmosphere during RTL. They displayed the capacity to show their social presence via controlled, yet ubiquitous online communication. The students explained that they were aware of the lecturers’ presence in the online environment.   Lecturers went on to create a nurturing and supportive environment during RTL by using a variety of strategies to engage students in learning activities, such as including synchronous and asynchronous forms of engagement, WhatsApp messaging and  Blackboard.

Generating student-centred learning activities

Our engagement with lecturers shows that student-centred learning activities online is a critical aspect of RTL. A student-centred approach to learning relies on constant dialogue and interaction between lecturers and students and ensures that student learning is at the heart of RTL. Lecturers focused on developing learning activities that cultivate understanding and autonomous learning opportunities. Rather than giving loads of notes and PowerPoints, a strategy of students-centred learning was developing activities that generate independent and critical thinking. Lecturers constructed activities that assist students in asking why and encouraged high order thinking. Too often, lecturers only rely on rote-learning questions and do not ask students to apply the concepts.

Providing peer support opportunities such as tutors and mentors

Remote teaching and learning can lead to students feeling alone in the learning process. What has to be accounted for is that learning is also a social activity and that lecturers have to develop opportunities for students to engage with one another in the learning process. A key feature of RTL is, therefore, providing access to peer learning and support. Some lecturers changed their pedagogical approaches by including peers, tutors and mentors and as part of the learning process. Online tutors and mentors played a crucial role in RTL so that students felt like they were part of a community of learners.  Having regular online tutor sessions allowed students to learn from their peers and to engage in the affective dimensions of RTL. Peer learning was encouraged through pedagogical strategies such as group work and paired learning activities in the online environment.

Extending the resources available to students

While we rely on texts in the traditional classroom, a vital element of RTL is to provide a range of resources for students to learn from such as audio, visual, print and online library resources. RTL forces lecturers to use audio and video as part of their pedagogical strategies. Ironically, print material is essential for students as lecturers fear that not all students would have access to the internet. The various pedagogical approaches resulted in lecturers attending to a broader range of students’ learning styles.

Responsiveness during assessments and ensuring that feedback is prompt

Assessments and feedback is a critical part of the RTL. Assessments always evoke anxiety and stress, and within the RTL context, anxieties about assessments are heightened. Responsiveness during assessments and ensuring that feedback is prompt was central to RTL. The feedback from students showed that students appreciated lecturers who communicated clearly about what to expect from assessments and those lecturers who responded to questions about assessments. For students to learn effectively, feedback after assessments must be prompt and must enable students to improve their work. Lecturers used various platforms to give feedback to students such as Blackboard and WhatsApp.

Utilising ICTs: To WhatsApp or not to WhatsApp?

Lecturers utilised ICTs tools extensively during RTL, and the most widely used tool was WhatsApp. The challenges were related to the style, and the manner of engagement as students would use a casual tone and would sometimes use expletives as part of their interaction with lecturers. Some lecturers did not want to impose themselves on the WhatsApp space and decided that a student representative should be part of the WhatsApp group and would in turn report to the lecturer.

Students studying at home

Factors such as as a noisy learning environment, an unsuitable place to study and learn and living with a large family impacted on RTL. Students also had to deal with psycho-social problems such as the anxiety and fear of not completing the academic year, the fear of COVID-19 and feeling alone while studying and not having the normal support of peers          

Before we answer this question, let’s first contextualize the structure, mandate and operating procedures of the Agrifood Technology Station. The Station consists of seven technical staff members, an Administrator and a Finance Officer. Our mandate is innovation support to SMEs in the food industry and also technology transfer and training. In our set of Standard Operating Procedures it would be quite evident that meeting this mandate requires significant two-way communication with our clients, other academics, suppliers and the public at large.

Now, having said that, it also implies that we need to do this in a way that the parties mentioned above understand, assimilate, use and critique such communication and its content. It will also be evident that the parties mentioned above would almost be a disparate group in terms of science. Put another way, the degree of knowledge of hard science and science “lingo” would vary greatly. In other words, ATS would need to communicate in different ways with different people pending their “science groundedness”.

Why the question in the first place? In the first instance, because of my own interest in science communication in terms of my role as manager of ATS. Hence my completing an online course in science communication through the Center for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at the University of Stellenbosch. In the second instance, the importance of science communication is growing in this science & technology-driven world. This is evidenced by articles in The Conversation:

• Why academics are losing relevance in society and how to stop it;
• Scientists have much to gain by sharing their research with the public;
• Science needs to start speaking to people’s everyday lives in Africa.

Our job at ATS is thus clearly dependent on communicating science and technology. Over the years we have worked with nano- or micro-enterprises up to multinationals and big corporates. This means we would have communicated with a wide variety of people of all educational backgrounds, including academics at other tertiary institutions. We have learnt over the years how to communicate technically challenging topics or processes. This includes breaking down these topics or processes into simple unit operations. In the initial life of ATS (more than 12 years ago now) this did prove somewhat of a challenge.

Some parts of the challenge was that, in many instances, the clients we serviced were, more often than not, well-versed and technically savvy in their special project or task. However, in the same instance, they would not be as savvy regarding all the supporting knowledge or other operations which they needed for support and for solving their specific problems/ projects. This is where the value of ATS arose i.e. having a good generals science and technology background we could help clients see the trees in the wood.

I also completed a crash course toward certification as a consultant. This was a generic course that could be applied to many different fields. Surprisingly, this course corroborated our learnings at ATS in terms of how to work with a client. This included the empathy required with problem solving as well as the need to listen well before responding. To me, this confirmed that our approach, still in use today, was the correct one.

n the “publish or perish” world of academia, the need to address everyday challenges of our communities has slowly become more important. As the old story goes, blue sky research was the order of the day, a large percentage of which was fundamental or far from directly answering critical, real-world challenges. Suffice to say that, via Universities of Technology and also now traditional universities, this is being remedied. The Agrifood Technology Station is one such unit among many others at the forefront of this bandwagon, again communicating solutions and information to the challenges and improving public understanding of the outcomes of such.

We do try our best!

L. Dolley