Only Colin Thakur can write like Colin Thakur. For the next couple of weeks, you will have to bear with my rather dry style of writing.
A few years ago, when I first arrived at DUT, I met all 6,500 first year students at the start of the academic year and asked if anyone had read any of Zakes Mda’s novels. Not a single hand went up and this set off in me a state of shock. How is it possible, I thought, for young South Africans who’ve been through 12 years of formal schooling not to encounter one of South Africa’s foremost novelists? It would be unthinkable in the USA, for instance, for novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee or Moby-Dick by Hermann Melville not to be a part of the growing up process of every young person – a part of the US canon.
But then I met students in Fashion, Engineering and so on who were, by March of their first year, already communicating with students in Beijing, Paris and London about their areas of study, using mainly the various platforms of social media. Wow! I thought to myself. How much must this be adding to the learning experience of these young people, and so soon after they’ve arrived on campus.
This was a wake-up call. I thought I knew what was needed of a university as it engages young people in their intellectual, social and emotional development. While I understood that teaching and learning were in a state of change, I hadn’t quite cottoned on to the fact that this was happening at a furious pace. The usual canon – while still important – may have to be revisited, reshaped, re-imagined and re-packaged. What fun for academics: a chance to renew our profession in the face of massive changes in the worlds of learning and technology.
Each generation has its historic moments; its participation in some epoch building event or chain of events that changes the course of history or that has an impact on the way we live. Sometimes it is a political event like our transition to democracy in 1994. Sometimes, it is some great scientific revolution like the discovery of DNA as genetic material in the 1950s or of quantum physics in the 1930s.
Cellphones work because we understand through quantum mechanics how the world behaves at its most basic levels – too small to be seen even through the most powerful microscopes that exist. Without quantum mechanics, there would be no computers as we know them today.
Sometimes these epochal events are due to the confluence of different discoveries and developments. We are living through such a historic moment now. The galloping pace at which e-learning is developing is likely to completely transform the ways in which we learn and teach and as such completely change the relationship between people and the world of information, knowledge, work, creativity and innovation.
What is e-learning? It is simply the integration of the information and communication technologies: computers, mobile devices, the cloud, multimedia devices and so on with the processes of learning and teaching. A total of 50 percent of the programmes at DUT have some form of e-learning and it will be just a short time before this is extended to 100 percent. We’ve made this a priority.
Why e-learning?
We have to begin by making a claim that the integration of educational technology into learning and teaching presents us with the wonderful opportunity to improve the quality of learning and teaching. One part of this is that e-learning will improve the capacity of pupils and students to assume the responsibility for the learning they engage in; to shift the emphasis from passive to active learning and thereby help to address the scourge of rote learning so prevalent in our education system.
The integration of different kinds of learning technologies into courses is critical to the effectiveness of e-learning. Online materials in the cloud will completely revolutionise the role of libraries at universities and elsewhere. Powerful, self-learning search engines will place enormous power in the hands (and heads) of individuals. Exciting and innovative simulations will help us to recreate the nexus between theory and practical learning. The active use of social media in learning is likely to build communities of learning in virtual classrooms.
Perhaps most importantly, and inspired by the late Steve Jobs of Apple, we are observing the rapid fusion of technology and human through the development of interfaces that reach beyond the traditional QWERTY keyboard. And we are observing already the way in which learning is being affected by this new era of human-technology interface.
Perhaps e-learning will open the way for education to become much more ubiquitous, as ubiquitous as mobile devices like smartphones and bandwidth.
Somebody once asked me what three things I would miss most if I were stuck on a desert island. They would be bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth! Ideally, in a society such as ours, we would want every South African to be engaged in some form of learning. This would be a massive part of a national social justice agenda. Online, on time, in place learning! This year DUT received some 90,000 applications from students who wished to study here and our intake in 2015 is restricted to 7,200. I am sure you see the challenge.
Am I suggesting that lectures, tutorials, lecturer consultations will no longer be necessary? No, there will always be the need for human-human interaction in learning and teaching.
DUT will launch its first MOOC (massive open online course) this year. Massive open online courses are already very common in other parts of the world. We hope that many of you will join this course.
– Professor Ahmed Bawa
* This article was published in the East Coast Mail.
