Inclusive education is the term used to describe an education system in which all learners are accepted and fully included, educationally and socially. The process of inclusion proves to have challenges in developing countries such as South Africa which adopted it a bit later than the developed countries. Research has mentioned that amongst other challenges is the lack of resources and overcrowding. Hence, this paper debates and discusses the challenges in the implementation of inclusive education in South African schools. The study was designed as a multiple case study research in which a qualitative research approach was employed. Three schools in the Buffalo City Metro and three participants per school participated in the study. Qualitative data analysis was grounded on an interpretive philosophy. The findings revealed that overcrowding, insufficient training, lack of knowledge and skills of educators were the overarching themes that resulted in educators feeling a sense of inadequacy to teach in an inclusive education classroom. The study will cover the challenges faced in the implementation of inclusive education. Therefore, the study recommends that inclusive education should cater to all learners irrespective of the type of disability.

Due to the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, higher education institutions were forced to embark on online teaching and learning. This came at a point where the entire teacher fraternity was not prepared for this shift from traditional face-to-face interaction to virtual learning. This qualitative, exploratory study was undertaken as a comparative analysis of the teaching, learning and facilitation experiences of three Teacher Educators. The focus was on teacher educators who engaged in a formal online teacher training program with first year pre-service teachers enrolled on the Bachelor of Education qualification.  Data was collected from the Teacher Educators in the form of interviews and reflective reports prepared at the conclusion of the 2021 academic year.  The data was thematically analysed to distil common lessons, challenges and points for the 3 Teacher Educators with the intention of learning from and improving on practice.   The paper addressed three research questions which guided the study and presents the researchers findings in the areas of student access to the learning platform; knowledge transfer from online lectures to practical application in the form of portfolio of evidence and the alignment between theory and practice. Recommendations include using a hybrid approach to preservice teacher preparation; using formative and summative assessment in making a judgement on competence and mastery and re-focussing student feedback as reflective essays.

There has been a recent explosion of interest from academics across a wide range of disciplines in the use of MultiUser Virtual Environments for education, driven by the success of platforms such as Internet Communication Technology learning skills in higher education. While digital virtual worlds are used in the 21st century learning, advances in the capabilities and the spread of technology have fed a recent boom in interest in massively multiuser 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, and this in turn has led to a surge of interest in their educational applications. As these platforms are used more often as environments for teaching and learning, there is increased need to integrate them with other institutional systems, Web-based Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in particular. In this paper, we briefly review the use of virtual worlds for education, from informal learning to formal instruction, and consider what is required to turn a virtual world from a MultiUser Virtual Environment into a fully fledged 3D Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). In this we focus on the development of Moodle-a system which integrates the popular 3D virtual world of Second Life with the open-source Virtual Learning Environment.

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