Browsing by Author "Gachago, Daniela"

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    Lecturers' perceptions of enhancing student engagement through anonymous online engagement strategies
    (2024) Mdanyana, Lungile; Gachago, Daniela; Shanali Govender
    Student engagement is widely acknowledged as significantly impacting academic accomplishment and learning in higher education, and it is frequently theorised and researched. However, institutions of higher learning have historically grappled with effective and sustainable ways of engaging students online in the teaching and learning process. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its extensive lockdowns and instant shift to fully online teaching and learning, created a more challenging context for student engagement. During this time, faculties and departments shifted from face-to-face to online teaching to continue teaching and learning activities. The emergency remote teaching context impacted student engagement in a wide range of ways and created an opportunity to understand student engagement in different contexts. This dissertation seeks to explore lecturers' perceptions and experiences of student engagement in online learning, with a particular focus on anonymous engagement as a strategy to enhance student engagem
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    Online studios and digital literacy skills among undergraduate students: An Activity Theory Perspective
    (2024) Mhungu, Blessed; Gachago, Daniela; Ng'ambi Dickson
    Recently, most higher education institutions have undergone significant technological transformation, largely attributed to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent rise in online education and the use of emerging technology tools . Consequently, the prevailing discourse no longer revolves solely around the feasibility of online education as a tool but pivots towards an inquiry into the extent of its usefulness in specialised domains such as design and technology fields. Research on the implementation of online education in design and technology fields is scant and yields inconclusive results, particularly concerning the pedagogical methods and the practicality of online instruction. As a result, investigating the practicality of online studios in enhancing digital literacy skills within the design and technology fields has , thus, become significant and urgent. Success in this endeavour hinges upon lecturers' proficiency with technological tools that facilitate cognitive development. This could necessitate the shift away from the traditional ‘master-apprentice' model to a more ‘cognitiveapprentice' model, which emphasises deeper understanding of the underlying principles, problemsolving techniques, and decision-making processes used by experts. The research question posed by the study was: What digital literacy skills do online studios promote among undergraduate students in a discipline-specific setting such design and information technology fields? The goal was to explore how educators in visual communication design programme and multimedia could transition from traditional studio methods to an online studio-based curriculum infused with technology. Theoretically, the study drew on Cultural Historical Activity theory (CHAT) sociocultural learning theory of Vygotsky, its influence on the three generations of activity that Engeström propounded, and the expansive learning model that Engeström developed. CHAT considered studio practices as a system of activities wherein collective work is undertaken by individual and group actors in pursuit of a common goal. Adopting an empirical exploratory case study approach, the study was conducted in a real-world context in real time, using multi-site, multi-method strategy for data collection and analysis. Data collection methods included interviews, focus groups and participant observations from students and lecturers at university of technology's faculty of Informatics and Design. The findings of this study reveal contradictions and tensions within the visual communication design programme and multimedia programme activity systems. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the transition to remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic presented an opportunity for lecturers to explore alternative methods to facilitate a studio pedagogy, most of which involve digital modalities of content delivery. The emergence of expansive learning fused with blended learning approach emerged as a ‘great-promise' for integrating technology into the studio. This approach is considered crucial in equipping students with relevant 21st century skills and enhancing their digital literacy, thereby addressing the evolving demands of design and technology education in the contemporary digital era.
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    Sentimentality and digital storytelling: towards a post-conflict pedagogy in pre-service teacher education in South Africa
    (2015) Gachago, Daniela; Ng'ambi, Dick; Bozalek, Vivienne
    This study is set against the background of a continued lack of social engagement across difference in South African classrooms. It set out to explore the potential of a specific pedagogical intervention - digital storytelling - as a post-conflict pedagogy in a diverse pre-service teacher education classroom. Personal storytelling has long been used to unearth lived experiences of differently positioned students in the classroom. More recently, the use of digital technologies has made it easier to transform these personal stories into publishable, screenable and sharable digital resources. In general, digital storytelling is lauded in the literature for its potential to facilitate an understanding across difference, allowing empathy and compassion for the 'Other'. In this study, I question this potentially naive take on digital storytelling in the context of post-conflict pedagogies. I was interested in the emotions emerging - particularly in what I termed a potential sentimentality - in both the digital storytelling process and product. I looked at sentimentality in a specific way: as the tension between the centrality of emotions to establish an affective engagement between a storyteller and the audience, and digital stories' exaggerated pull on these emotions. This is seen, for example, in the difficulty that we have when telling stories in stepping out of normative, sentimental discourses to trouble the way we perform gender, race, class and sexuality, all of which are found in the actual stories we tell and the images we use. It is also found in the audience response to digital storytelling. Adopting a performative narrative inquiry research methodology, framed by theorists such as Butler, Ahmed, and Young, all three feminist authors interested in the politics of difference, working at the intersection of queer, cultural, critical race and political theory, I adopted three different analytical approaches to a narrative inquiry of emotions. I used these approaches to analyse stories told in a five-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with nine pre-service teacher-education students. Major findings of this study are: In everyday life stories, students positioned themselves along racial identities, constructing narratives of group belonging based primarily on their racialized identities. However, in some students' stories - particularly those that offer a more complex view of privilege, acknowledging the intersectionality of class, gender, age, sexuality and race - these conversations are broken up in interesting ways, creating connections between students beyond a racial divide. Looking at the digital story as a multimodal text with its complex orchestration of meaning-making through its different modes, it became clear to me that conveying authorial intent is difficult and that the message of a digital story can be compromised in various ways. The two storytellers I looked at in more detail drew from different semiotic histories and had access to different semiotic resources, such as different levels of critical media literacy, with this compromising their authorial intent to tell counterstories. Finally, the genre storytellers chose, the context into which their stories were told, along with their positioning within this context in terms of their privilege, affected the extent to which they could make themselves vulnerable. This consequently shaped the audience response, which was characterised by passive empathy, a sentimental attempt to connect to what makes us the 'same', rather than recognising systemic and structural injustices that characterise our engagements across difference.
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    Social media enhanced boundary crossing: exploring distance students' ecosystems of learning support
    (2020) Mwanda, Ziyanda; Ng'ambi, Dickson; Gachago, Daniela
    As the demand for distance learning increases, traditional campus-based universities continue to struggle in supporting working distance students. This has resulted in the increased phenomena of students using social media within their ecosystems of learning support. The use of formal and informal tools such as social media gives rise to boundaries which students need to cross for effective support. How social media facilitates the crossing of boundaries within ecosystems of learning support remains an unfamiliar area of research. This study employed a predominately qualitative research methods, with a small element being a quantitative method to view and investigate postgraduate distance students' ecosystem of learning support holistically. The findings of this study revealed that participants used a combination of formal and informal tools to support their learning, including social media. In particular WhatsApp, which enables the crossing of transitional, formal and informal learning contexts, hierarchical and, time and space boundaries. Recognizing social media as an important part of students' learning support ecosystem, allowed an expanded view on learning support. As such, the study highlighted a range of different learning mechanisms which occur when students cross these boundaries, with coordination being the dominant learning mechanism. In conclusion, social media (such as WhatsApp) does indeed enhance the crossing of various boundaries to support learning. However, some students do not necessarily perceive their interaction on social media as learning, which speaks to the need of legitimising social media as learning tools by institutions. This study then recommends the need for institutions to recognize and nurture the use of social media as one element of a distance learning support ecosystem for cost-effective student support strategies guided by institutional guidelines and policies.
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    Technology enhanced teaching and learning in South African higher education – A rearview of a 20 year journey
    (British Journal of Educational Technology, 2016-07-18) Ng'ambi, Dick; Brown, Cheryl; Bozalek, Vivienne; Gachago, Daniela; Wood, Denise
    In the last 20 years, the South African higher education has changed significantly, influenced by global trends national development goals and pressure from local educational imperatives, in the context of a digitally networked world. Shifts in technology enhanced pedagogical practices and in discourses around information and communication technologies (ICTs) have had varying degrees of influence in higher education. This paper takes a rearview of a 20-year journey of technology enhanced learning in South African higher education. An analysis of literature view is presented chronologically in four phases: phase 1 (1996–2000), phase 2 (2001–05), phase 3 (2006–10) and phase 4 (2011–16). In phase 1 technology was used predominantly for drill and practice, computer-aided instruction, with growing consciousness of the digital divide. In phase 2 institutions primarily focused on building ICT infrastructure, democratizing information, policy development and research; they sought to compare the effectiveness of teaching with or without technology. During phase 3 institutions began to include ICTs in their strategic directions, digital divide debates focused on epistemological access, and they also began to conduct research with a pedagogical agenda. In phase 4 mobile learning and social media came to the fore. The research agenda shifted from whether students would use technology to how to exploit what students already use to transform teaching and learning practices. The paper concludes that South Africa's higher education institutions have moved from being solely responsible for both their own relatively poor ICT infrastructure and education provision to cloud-based ICT infrastructure with “unlimited” educational resources that are freely, openly and easily available within and beyond the institution. Although mobile and social media are more evident now than ever before, teaching and learning practice in South African higher education remains largely unchanged.
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    Towards a Shared Understanding of emerging technologies: experiences in a collaborative research project in South Africa
    (Kennesaw State University, 2013) Ng'ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela; Backhouse, Judy; Bozalek, Vivienne; Ivala, Eunice; Bosman, Jan Petrus
    While the practice of using educational technologies in Higher Education is increasingly common among educators, there is a paucity of research on innovative uses of emerging technologies to transform teaching and learning. This paper draws on data collected as part of a larger study aimed at investigating emerging technologies and their use in South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to improve teaching and learning. The research employed a mixed method research design, using both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods—quantitative data from a survey of 262 respondents from 22 public HEIs in South Africa and qualitative data gathered from 16 experts/practitioners on their self-reflective definition of the term "emerging technologies". The paper concludes that levels of institutional development, access to resources, discipline, group belonging and individual motivation of respondents influenced the way they defined emerging technologies including what constituted an innovative use of technology, foregrounding the contextuality of emerging technologies.
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    Transforming teaching with emerging technologies: implications for higher education institutions
    (Unisa Press, 2013) Bozalek, Vivienne; Ng'ambi, Dick; Gachago, Daniela
    A gulf is widening between the technologies used by students, those used by educators and those provided by institutions. However, knowledge about the impact of so-called emerging technologies on learning or the readiness of higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage with such technologies in the South African context is relatively thin. This article uses Rogers' (2003) diffusion of innovations model as a conceptual framework to examine the diffusion, adoption and appropriation of emerging technologies in South African HEIs. We report on a survey which examined how emerging technologies are used in innovative pedagogical practices to transform teaching and learning across South African HEIs. The article concludes that, in order to foster a greater uptake or more institution-wide diffusion of use of emerging technologies, institutional opinion leaders need to purposefully create an enabling environment by giving recognition to and communicating with change agents, and developing policies that will encourage institutional-wide engagement with emerging technologies.
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    When UTAUT2 meets design thinking mindset: Exploring e-learning champions? Adoption of blended learning at EMU
    (2025) Issufo, Vali; Gachago, Daniela; Govender, Shanali
    Blended learning has increasingly been recognised as an effective approach to enhance student success in higher education, and to make this possible, educational technologies are crucial. Despite significant improvements to ICT infrastructure, staff training programs and help desk support, uptake differs considerably across contexts (Mohan et al., 2020) and scholars (Sherman & Howard, 2012; Taherdoost, 2018) suggest that motivation is at the core of technology acceptance. This study seeks to understand the factors motivating lecturers to accept blended learning at Eduardo Mondlane University (EMU) in Mozambique, by following a group of three lecturers who have been thriving in adopting blended learning and are eager to support others in their adoption of blended learning as well, designated in the study as "blended learning champions". The study was initially framed by the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) - a model that, through a combination of constructs such as performance expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions, has been used to understand factors influencing an individual's acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh et al., 2012). Historically, using theories such as UTAUT2, technology acceptance has been understood through statistical analysis of large quantitative data sets. However, this study focuses on the stories told by three "blended learning champions" drawing from qualitative in-depth interviews. Using participatory action techniques (Bozalek & Biersteker, 2010), such as Rivers of Life and Community Mapping over six individual interviews and a focus group, I elicited detailed narrative data, which appeared to go beyond the UTAUT2 model. Thematic analysis was employed to identify key patterns and insights from this qualitative data. Thus, later, I turned to research on design thinking mindsets (Gachago et al., 2017), which looks at characteristics of people that help them approach problems in unique and innovative ways, such as empathy, curiosity, collaborativeness and others. The study shows that for these blended learning champions, the availability of ICT infrastructure, training, helpdesk support and so on are, as expected, Facilitating Conditions. However, what is interesting is that, when faced with challenges, blended learning champions tend first to look inward for solutions. The study also reveals that they are well aware that adopting new technologies and methodologies will be challenging, which is why, in terms of Effort expectancy, they engage with one problem at a time. Moreover, blended learning champions also feel confident that, by gradually adopting blended learning, their performance will improve (Performance expectancy), while, at the same time, improving their work-life balance. Blended learning champions understand that experimenting and failing are part of the learning process. Unlike most studies with UTAUT2, Social influence was found to have less impact; these blended learning champions feel unburdened by peer pressure and generally feel comfortable whenever they do not know what to do or commit mistakes while using technology. All of these are elements of a design thinking mindset or culture. This research contributes to a local understanding of the factors motivating lecturers' uptake of blended learning. Thus, to boost blended learning uptake, institutions should not only focus on Facilitating Conditions such as technological infrastructure and staff training, but also create a less pressured and more empathetic environment where lectures feel at ease with what they do not know, are presented with a modest but steady adoption process, and where educational technologies contribute to the improvement of their work-life balance. As such, the study confirms the theory underpinning the design thinking mindset in relation to what motivates the blended learning champions, and this contributes to creating a bridge between design thinking and technology acceptance research. Finally, the study has highlighted the importance of the individual context in UTAUT2 research. How to create such a culture in the current climate of a neoliberal university remains an important question, which might be a topic of further research.