Abstract:
Vocational education is a key area in any country, but in South Africa,
with an unemployment rate of over 40% in spite of increased economic
growth, effective delivery of vocational education, particularly in
technical and commercial fields, is essential not only for the country’s
development, but for its survival. Moreover, further education plays a
pivotal role in the process of transformation and redress in post-apartheid
South Africa, which, coupled with a rapidly developing-economy, will
require “lifelong learning” rather than a few years of post-school degree.
Computers are popularly viewed as the solution to all educational
problems, but computer technology is only effective when it can be seen
to enhance learning approaches catering for specific local needs. This
paper describes an attempt to enhance delivery of semester
Communication Skills courses at a multicultural technikon, the Durban
Institute of Technology, by running them in mixed mode, i.e., partly in
conventional face-to-face lectures and tutorials, and partly over the
Internet. The Comm. Skills Online project generated an incredibly rich
layering of experiences in mixed-mode course delivery for the author, who
personally facilitated and assessed the work of over 230 students in three
different mode blends, and, in addition, supervised the computer
laboratory work of over 300 students - many of whom had come to DIT
from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and who were first-time
computer and Internet users. This account will first give an overview of
the use of Information and Computer Technology in the South African
educational context. It will then focus on the learning approach used in the
project, describe how it was translated into mixed mode, discuss the
resulting blends of mixed-mode delivery which were used in the project,
and give an account of both the enhancements achieved and the problems
encountered.
Description:
In S. P. Schaffer and M. L. Price (eds.), Interactive convergence: critical issues in multimedia, Vol. 10