My journey in technology enhanced education within engineering to achieve sustainability amidst disruptions

Abstract

Abstract Educational transformation in higher education places new demands on academics, especially in terms of shifting from traditional methods of teaching and learning to the application of innovative methods. Engaging with technology can be daunting for many lecturers. Especially during the times of disruption finding an alternate way of making sure that the lecturer reaches out to students in a student-centred approach. These disruptions have taken various forms and has happened in our institution as part of #feesmustfall as one of the prominent examples. There have been instances where lecturers couldn’t get hold of students and the willing students didn’t get an opportunity to come to campus to be facilitated or give information or even allowed to write assessments. Student attendance has been a serious issue all along and the whole sustainability of the department or the qualifications being offered. This has in a way given us lecturers to sit back reflect and think of ways that we could avoid it and make our institution sustainable as well as the future of higher education. Being a University of Technology we were fortunate enough to hold on to educational technologies to reach out to students post assessments and also adopted technology as a medium to conduct summative assessments. My presentation focuses on my own journey towards blended learning. The journey will showcase, how it started small and has subsequently moved towards introducing more tools responding to feedback from students. The session will be an amalgamation of all the blended learning methods that has been used so far and will showcase selected clips of those being used in the class to the students. The journey starts by introducing students to the LMS, online assignment submission and the use of Google Docs for a student feedback survey. It then moves on to introducing more interactive tools and activities such as role-play and digital storytelling as one form of their assessment. Finally classroom engagement, where it’s either podcast or screencast the session and use the world cafe methodology pre and post a chapter/module. This small-step, iterative, reflective way of introducing technologies has helped me gain confidence and design learning experiences that fit my context and my students’ profile. Evaluation and student feedback showed that participants benefitted from the exposure and were more confident in the classroom. This gives me an indication that using technology definitely helps students and supports and assists them on the go. It also ensures that students can be tracked back on the progress made, be it in terms of understanding of concepts and theories, or be it submission of assignments or even being part of group discussions and peer feedback. At times, it helps the disadvantaged students to gain access to resources and tasks within their comfort zone if they couldn’t make it to the campus for some or the other reason. Hence I can conclude that my approach addresses to the right target group keeping the institutional and the education industry’s sustainability in perspective.