Browsing by Subject "e-learning"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Open Access
    Barriers to students' use of electronic resources during lectures
    (South African Institute of Computer Scientists, 2008) Ng'ambi, Dick; Rambe, Patient
    This paper highlights one of the barriers for implementing an educational technology policy at a higher education institution. As more courses use a Learning Management System (LMS), learning resources are electronic and an increasing number of students are using Notebook computers for accessing electronic resources and reading on the screen. However, there is a dichotomy between provision of electronic resources and students being allowed to use Notebooks during classes. This paper explores lecturers' ambivalence towards student use of Notebooks during classes and illustrates how such perceptions are becoming a barrier to successful implementation of an educational technology policy.
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    Open Access
    Degrees of openness: the emergence of open educational resources at the University of Cape Town
    (University of the West Indies, 2009) Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Gray, Eve
    Information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a range of opportunities to share educational materials and processes in ways that are not yet fully understood. In an extraordinary development, increasing numbers of traditional and distance universities are using ICTs to make a selection of their teaching resources freely available as 'open education resources' (OER). The University of Cape Town recently signed the Cape Town Open Education Declaration signalling some senior level support for the notion of OER. In anticipation of an institution-wide roll-out, lecturers and educational technologists at UCT are grappling with the issues that need to be addressed to meet this intent. This paper suggests that careful analysis of existing educational materials and processes is necessary to provide an indication of what can be done to make them more openly available beyond the confines of an individual teaching and learning space. However, the deceptively simple term “open” hides a reef of complexity. This paper endeavours to unravel the degrees of openness with respect to key attributes of OER, namely social, technical, legal and financial openness in an attempt to make the task of identifying where changes could be made to existing teaching materials or processes a little easier for the lecturer and the educational technologist alike. While acknowledging the potential value of content, we contend, however, that it is the opening up of educational processes, which we are calling Open Pedagogy (OP) enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies that are set to play the more transformational role in the collaboration between students and lecturers.
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    Open Access
    A study of the relationship between institutional policy organisational culture and e-learning use in four South African universities
    (Elsevier Ltd., 2009) Czerniewicz, Laura; Brown, Cheryl
    This article investigates the relationship between policy (conceptualised as goals, values and resources), organisational culture and elearning use. Through both qualitative and quantitative research methods, we gathered data about staff and student perspectives from four diverse South African universities representing a selection of ICT in education policy types (Structured and Unstructured) and organisational cultural types of ""collegium, bureaucracy, corporate and enterprise"" (McNay 1995). While our findings show a clear relationship between policy and use of ICTs for teaching and learning, organisational culture is found crucial to policy mediation and the way that elearning use is embedded within the organisation. We conclude that although a Structured Corporate institutional type enables the attainment of a ""critical mass""within e-learning, Unstructured Collegium institutions are better at fostering innovation. Unstructured Bureaucratic institutions are the least enabling of either top-down or bottom-up elearning change.