Adoption of information and communication technologies in teaching and learning at a university

Abstract

The study was a cross-sectional exploratory survey to determine lecturers' and students' use of the core e-learning site, e-Thuto, at the Central University of Technology, Free State (CUT). The goal was to determine the adoption of electronic learning via information and communication technologies (ICTs) towards the improvement of the quality of teaching and learning. Yet, research cites several resource and skills challenges hindering ICT adoption in teaching and learning in developing economies that remain unaddressed. Data were collected from 10 lecturers in the Department of Communication Sciences at the CUT and 90 undergraduate students from all the four CUT faculties in order to correlate lecturers' and students' perspectives. Therefore, a structured interview schedule was used. Data were analysed using the emic and etic approaches where the respondents' categorisation of behaviour, correlated with conceptual categories from literature, was regarded as the reality in the study context. The findings indicate a limited adoption of e-Thuto in teaching and learning due to several impediments. The policy implications point towards a more systematic integration of ICTs into the curriculum.

Learning Management Based on Information and Communication Technology in Improving Student Learning Outcomes

“…Other research results indicate that teachers are reluctant to use technology. The difficulty lies in creating a system that forces all instructors to receive training and use ICT (Moyo, 2019).…”

The obstinate notion that higher education is a meritocracy

“…We are thus not without a range of powerful theoretical lenses that will allow us to better understand the processes of student success and failure, but as Niven ( 2012) and others have shown (for example, Moyo, 2018;Hlengwa, et al, 2018), this scholarship of teaching and learning has failed to achieve much traction within the university itself.…”

“…While there is an enormous body of work researching student learning, much of it is simplistic (Hlengwa, et al, 2018) and even where more sophisticated accounts are available, they are rarely called upon to improve university practice (Niven, 2012), allowing problematic common-sense understandings to thrive (Moyo, 2018). This article makes the case for a social account of learning that foregrounds the agency of students as social beings alongside a consideration of the intersection of such agency with social structures.…”

Taking Full Advantage of the COVID-19 Era to Intensify the Use of Information and Communication Technology Tools in Higher Education Institutes

“…According to Carmona (2013), a key component of the educational process in a classroom and in a textbook is the use of ICT facilities. Moyo (2019) argued that there are numerous advantages to using ICT resources for learning in higher education institutions that have, up till now, gone largely untapped. Accordingly, since the majority of academic institutions have been forced to shift to ICTbased approach, the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has provided an opportunity for ICT resources to take center stage.…”