Convening Committee Members
Convenor
Dr Nicola Pallitt (RU)
Dr Nicola Pallitt coordinates the efforts of the Educational Technology Unit at Rhodes University. She offers professional development opportunities for academics to use learning technologies effectively in their roles as educators and provides learning design support and consultation in relation to teaching with technology (technology integration) and blended and online teaching and learning. Nicola is passionate about using her Media Studies and Educational Technology background to support lecturers in Higher Education to design innovative technology mediated learning interventions for their students. She believes in creating online materials and opportunities to enable meaningful and memorable learning experiences. She also supervises postgraduate students and co-teaches on formal courses in Higher Education.
Broadly, her research interests pertain to expanding critical perspectives on educational technologies in Higher Education. In particular, Nicola’s research focuses on online facilitation and networking, learning design, online professional development, teaching portfolios, student video projects, networked scholarship and digital storytelling. Her curiosity driven research area related to her PhD research is digital games and she is one of the few Game Studies scholars in Africa.
Nicola is also a visiting lecturer in the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town and co-convenes the fully online course, Facilitating Online, as part of e/merge Africa’s online offerings. e/merge Africa is a project hosted at UCT, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is an online professional development network for educational technology researchers and practitioners based in African Higher Education.
Co-convenor
The TEL CLC aims to provide a national platform for members to engage in an emergent Community of Practice, drawing on the strengths of its members to facilitate cooperation, collaboration and ongoing development in relation to teaching and learning strategies for integrating technology into curricula in a meaningful way. Key themes for discussion identified thus far include:
- contextually appropriate approaches to blended and online teaching,
- the need to go beyond solutionist approaches to TEL,
- fostering sound pedagogical approaches to T&L through the use of TEL initiatives,
- building capacity for digital teaching amongst lecturers and fostering digital fluency of staff and students,
- TEL initiatives and designs for learning that advance social justice, are ethical and inclusive, and take the decolonisation of knowledge into account,
- local approaches to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and whether this is a realistic in our highly unequal society,
- fosters critical and scholarly perspectives and provides opportunities to generate and share case studies and research related to TEL that goes beyond ‘show-and-tell’ formats, and
- takes a theoretical stance and is informed by global and national research.
- This CLC is for lecturers, academic development practitioners, educational technology researchers and professionals (instructional or learning designers, etc.) working in South African higher education who are involved in or interested in TEL.
What you may want to approach the TEL CLC for:
- Professional development opportunities related to the above
- Opportunities for collaborative research and sharing local case studies
- Opportunities for sub-groups within the broader TEL CLC eg. Learning Management System (LMS) user groups, LO & IDs group, etc.
Updates
Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) CLC: Announcement
Please complete this form to join the CLC and inform future activities
Resources:
- Blended Learning Resources – The Universities of Cape Town, Free State, Johannesburg, and Pretoria have developed these resources through a collaborative research project.
- Centre for Innovative, Education and Communication Technologies (CIECT) Blog – the University of the Western Cape (UWC)
- Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) – UCT Teaching Online Portal
- CHE. June 2020. Quality Assurance Guidelines for Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning and Assessment during the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020
- Rhodes University:
Teaching and Learning with Technology: Reframing traditional understandings and practices (2016)
Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning Resources - Stellenbosch University:
Responding to the necessity for change: Higher Education voices from the South during the COVID-19 crisis - University of the Free State:
#UFSTeachOn Lecturer Guide
FAQ Assessment Edition
LearnOn campaign - University of Johannesburg:
UJ Toolkit for off-campus teaching & learning (CAT)
UJ Assessment guidelines for learning at a distance
Report on the transition to remote teaching and learning
Universities South Africa (USaF) – Covid-19 fosters a need to re-imagine the university as a social institution - UCT Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching:
Remote Teaching Resources
Teaching Online Portal
Publications:
Belluigi, D., Czerniewicz, L., Khoo, S., Algers, A., Buckley, LA., Prinsloo, P., Mgqwashu, E., Camps, C., Brink, C., Marx, R., Wissing, G., & Pallitt, N. 2020. “Needs Must”? Critical reflections on the implications of the Covid19 ‘pivot online’ for equity in higher education. Digital Culture and Education. https://www.
Czerniewicz, L.; Agherdien, N.; Badenhorst, J.; Belluigi, D.; Chambers, T.; Chili, M.; de Villiers, M.; Felix, A.; Gachago, D.; Gokhale, C.; Ivala, E.; Kramm, N.; Madiba, M.; Mistri, G.; Mgqwashu, E.; Pallitt, N.; Prinsloo, P.; Solomon, K; Strydom, S.; Swanepoel, M.; Waghid, F. & Wissing, G. 2020. A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/
For further information or to add to the conversation, please reach out to Nomfundo at info@heltasa.org.za.
