Monthly Archives: January 2012

How to improve the student experience by using technology.

How to change digital dinosaur mindset.

Managing and balancing the fads and the so-called emerging technologies and determining those technologies that can add value to the learning environment. Understanding the value and pitfalls of social media in education. It is not easy to support the new digtal wave of initiators, who flies from one technology to the next like moths to a light, without burning a few wings on the way.

Surveys on use and perceptions see the light and the turn-around time for technologies are unpredictable and shorter by the day. New mobile technologies become mainstream faster than anticipated. Administrators and academic support units pool together to share best practice and adoption strategies and to share insight on all related emerging trends in e-learning.

Workshop slideshow presentation

The vendors are getting more aggressive. Everybody see the higher education environment as cash cows, but they fail to read national and international reports on government spending and the reduction of subsidies for education. Private organisations now organise and manage educational conferences for profit. Publication houses offer LMS freebies as part of the content.

Government ministers are getting uptight about the fact that ICT’s turned out to NOT be the Holy Grail and saviour of education for the masses with unprecedented improvement in pass rates. It becomes clear that a newly defined gap, called the digital divide, between the digital natives and the digital dinosaurs are actually widening. Academic support units realises that the only solution to work with technology laggards in education is to retire them.

Education purists are pumping out educational research papers and publish paradigms and conceptual theory that can kill if orally digested – outcomes based education fails – or did the implementation of another educational pedagogy fail?

Conference presentation

Most South African Universities have now established their e-learning support to academics and are using ICT’s in education, whether as computer literacy programs in the curriculum, or using institutional learner management systems, or both. The last 2 to 3 years also saw some ICT jealousy and therefor it became obvious that my gun is bigger than your gun.

Unfortunately nothing comes from any initiative to establish benchmarks to measure effective utilisation and incorporation of technology in mainstrean education. Administrators are looking at the cost of educational technology and getting very upset when touring university corridors to the see the age-old practice of talk-and-chalk dominating teacher-centric activities in old-fashioned classrooms still overpowering spaces that should be learning-centric communities of learning.

Institutions are fightinh each other – primarily proprietory LMS versus open-source LMS. One thing that academics are not good with is to try and understand ROI or TCO. – Eish!

Academic development workshop presentation  

The South African Government published the White paper on e-Education in South Africa. Now we have national understanding on the anticipated use of ICT’s in education, and it becomes clear that the national government is looking at Higher Education to research and guide the country on the needs, the effectivenes and the required strategies to use technology at all levels of education.

Regional governments have strategies in place to to bring computers into all schools and connect the schools on the world wide web. The Khanya project of the Western Cape is a good exxample of this type of project.  It is now important to position HE within this national framework and to define the role of e-learning at HE.

Conference presentation

The LMS is now firmly established and we look at ways to get wider acceptance of the online web-based Learning and Teaching environment. The inniators are having fun, the early adopters are involved. The late adopters are getting itchy because they can see the benifit of this ‘new’ e-learning environment.

As administrator on the institutional LMS it becomes apparent that we have to move away from a project management thinking and move over to a change-management thinking. So the next is now to investigate all the best practices available to cultivate this institution-wide adoption of technology and implement new adoption strategies.

National Workshop presentation