The Uses of Information and Communication (ICT) in Teaching and Learning in South African Higher Education Practices in the Western Cape. Research: Information and Communication Technologies

Numerous South African policy documents support the use of ICTs in education, claiming that they can be beneficial to education, in a variety of ways. This article seeks to understand how ICTs are used in practice as part of teaching and learning, since access to ICTs alone does not ensure use, nor automatically add value. Through a regional study conducted in five higher education institutions in the Western Cape, we describe how and to what extent academic staff and students are using ICTs as part of teaching and learning events. Using an analytical framework adapted from Laurillard, we are able to provide more complex descriptions of how ICTs are being used, and to describe how specific staff and student groupings use ICTs differently. We confirm that ICTs are certainly being used as part of teaching and learning, most frequently as part of discovery and creation events. We also identify areas where the specific possibilities and affordances of ICTs are not being exploited. In addition, we identify anomalies in use in terms of age, and disciplinary domain. We find too that students report using ICTs to support their learning activities even when it is not required of them to do so. This evokes questions about staff-student interactions, and has implications for institutional staff development strategies.