Dick Ng'ambi

• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at University of Cape Town

One of the challenges of teaching current students’ history is how to transform a generally boring subject to appeal to 21st century students. The continued use of traditional methods in teaching history by lecturers emphasizes recitation and narration. This makes student inactive. In this paper, we propose a model for teaching history using emergi...

Although culturally diverse students have potential to create enriched learning resources, it is difficult to harness students’ agency and to aggregate individual contributions into a meaningful learning resource. This is one of the challenges facing higher education institutions in South Africa where institutions are increasingly cosmopolitan and...

One of the challenges facing higher education institutions in general and Uganda in particular, is the widening gulf between increased use of technology for teaching and learning and achieving meaningful learning outcomes, especially in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we report on one use of technology where a teacher's integratio...

This paper seeks to highlight how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are used for economic development in Africa and the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in this regard. The paper summarises secondary data on eight countries, namely Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar and South Africa. There ar...

One of the challenges facing teachers in general, and those in South Africa, is the lack of skills to design pedagogically integrated eLearning environments. This paper argues that the use of a Teaching Change Frame (TCF) (Tarling and Ng'ambi, 2016) is a useful framework to guide teachers to effectively design eLearning environment. In addition, co...

This paper reflects on a digital storytelling project set in pre-service teacher education in South Africa and its potential to understand and use emotions as socio-politically constructs. We focus on the audience response to one specific story engaging with race relations. Framed by theorists of the affective turn and in particular Lugones’ concep...

Against the backdrop of continuing racism-both overt and subtle-in South Africa's classrooms, this article describes one lecturer's attempt at facilitating conversations around race relations in South Africa with nine pre-service student educators. Using Bamberg's (2012) positioning analysis to analyse how students constructed stories of difference...

This paper explores the use of the WikiEducator E-quiz platform as an educational tool to enhance self-assessment techniques applied by distance and open education learners. Anderson’s Model explains six different types of interaction: student-student, student-teacher, student-content, teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content. The model...

Employers have criticised graduates for inadequate skills to apply knowledge into practice due to the traditional teaching and learning methods which concentrate more on theory than practice. Technology affords several teaching and learning methods like social media which students are already motivated to use. The research therefore used Facebook t...

In the last 20 years, the South African higher education has changed significantly, influenced by global trends national development goals and pressure from local educational imperatives, in the context of a digitally networked world. Shifts in technology enhanced pedagogical practices and in discourses around information and communication technolo...

One of the challenges facing education systems in general and the South African education system in particular is how to understand ways that teachers change from nonusers of technologies to becoming transformative teachers with technology. Despite numerous initiatives, not limited to training, workshops and so forth, to bring about sustained and w...

This chapter focuses on learning with technologies in contexts where resources are constrained. It provides an overview of learning in resource-constrained environments, examines what learning with technologies entails and then overviews the theoretical perspective as useful when considering learning with technologies in resource-constrained enviro...

Students at Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in developing countries face challenges not limited to large classes and inability to quickly understand lectures as these are delivered in English language which is adopted in most higher education as a medium of instruction. This challenge is compounded for students who speak English as their secon...

This chapter reports on how educators at higher education institutions can appropriate emerging technologies to transform pedagogical practices with varying degrees of success. Through these case studies, the chapter illustrates how technologies, not necessarily new technologies, are being used to address teaching and learning challenges. In Case s...

span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"> Although social networking sites (SNS) are increasingly popular among students, their academic application is unfolding on trial basis and best practices for integration into mainstream teaching are yet to be fully realised. More importantly, is the need to understand how these sites sh...

This paper argues that history education is becoming dangerously obsolete, as it does not always relate to the contemporary needs of 21st century learners, who often find history useless and irrelevant to their present situation. This challenge is attributed to, among other reasons, the way history is taught through largely lecture-driven pedagogie...

Although student engagement has potential to enhance learning and student retention, the use of digital games to achieve this learning outcome remains a challenge in higher education. while the role of gamification is highly predicated in horizon reports to enter mainstream education, the popularity of game-based learning has remained marginal. in...

In the last decade, emerging technologies and transformative practices have diffused into higher education social systems in ways that formal leadership styles are increasingly stretched to both keep abreast of and to manage. While many scholars have argued for the importance of the role of leadership styles in shaping the strategic direction of in...

Face-to-face learning is most prominent in higher education in developing countries of Africa, where learning is teacher-centred; this type of learning does not promote deep learning. Vodcasts and podcasts are increasingly becoming popular in higher education as a means of enhancing learning especially for part-time students who are separated by di...

Although there is an increasing use of emerging technologies (ETs) in higher education internationally and in South Africa in particular, there is little evidence that their use is transforming teaching and learning practice. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is a dichotomy between the technologies supported and used in higher education instituti...

Despite the potential benefits of a collaborative approach to OER production, sharing and distribution, little research has been directed to it. Furthermore, collaboration is not a panacea to the complex OER agenda, which is not limited to intellectual property rights, cost implications and academic concerns often evidenced through resistance to gi...

Open Educational Resources (OER) – that is, teaching, learning and research materials that their owners make free to others to use, revise and share – offer a powerful means of expanding the reach and effectiveness of worldwide education. Those resources can be full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, software, and othe...

Although use of podcasts and vodcasts are increasingly becoming popular in higher education, their use is usually unidirectional and therefore replicates the transmission mode of traditional face-to-face lectures. In this paper, the authors propose a tool, MOBILect, a mobile lecturing tool that enables users to comment on lecture vodcasts using mob...

Although the use of emerging technologies is on the rise in Higher Education (HE) globally and South Africa in particular, it is seldom used in a way that facilitates transformative teaching and learning. One of the most common reasons why educators do not use emerging technologies to improve their teaching and learning practices is the lack of ped...

Vodcasts are increasingly becoming popular in higher education as a means of enhancing learning especially for part time students who are separated by distance from their tutor. In this paper we propose a tool, MOBILect, that enables students to comment on lecture vodcasts using mobile devices, and aggregated comments become an educational resource...

Although podcasting is popular in higher education, there is limited research on podcasting in developing institutions or resource constrained environments. There are fragmented implementations of podcasting projects by enthusiastic faculty but the tools used are often proprietary, imported from the West by administrators without any consultation w...

Recording lectures have potential to serve as supplementary material to a conventional face-to-face lecture. One of the challenges of face-to-face lectures is the lack of persistency. In contexts of varied levels of student preparedness for higher education, such as South Africa, the lack of persistent of face-to-face lectures makes it difficult fo...

One of the challenges facing higher education (HE) in South Africa is to increase the number of science and engineering graduates. At the core of these disciplines is mathematics. Thus, the problem is that poorly prepared students find it difficult to succeed in university mathematics. This paper argues that the use of mobile phones has potential t...

The paper employs two case studies to develop an approach for using podcasts to enhance student learning. The case studies involve two cohorts of postgraduate students enrolled on a blended course, over two years. In both cases, the institutional learning management system was used as a server to host the podcasts, giving students discretion on how...

Most higher education in South Africa adopt English language as a medium of instruction, which made it difficult for students who speak and write English as a second or third language to cope with the face-to-face lectures. Face-to-face lectures lack persistence and when students fail to understand the lectures during the once off face-to-face sess...

This chapter discusses the blending of anonymous short message services (SMS) with a learning management system (LMS) to support non-traditional postgraduate learners in a block release programme at a higher education institution. The personal ownership of the mobile phone, coupled with its consistent presence and connectivity, was enhanced through...

This chapter discusses the blending of anonymous short message services (SMS) with a learning management system (LMS) to support non-traditional postgraduate learners in a block release programme at a higher education institution. The personal ownership of the mobile phone, coupled with its consistent presence and connectivity, was enhanced through...

One of the challenges of using multiple dialogues from a transdisciplinary-informing network of heterogeneous collective of Informers and Clients is appropriating the channel to cognitively shift agents. The role of Facebook as an Informing Network and how both Informers and Clients transform in the process of use has not been exploited. The conver...

One of the reasons educators discourage students from using mobile phones in class is because of their [mobile phones] disruptive potential. This paper argues that students are most likely to be distracted if they are not actively engaged with a lesson. However, it is difficult to actively engage students when teaching is didactic. The paper exploi...

In the Information Age, the communication patterns between doctor and patient are changing. Using Everett Rogers' theory of Diffusion of Innovations, this paper begins by examining the diffusion of the Internet in the world and in Oman. It then considers the emergence of e-patients. The characteristics of e-patients are described in some detail. Th...

This paper reports on a case study of a Health Open Educational Resources (OER) project in order to examine how to facilitate cross-institutional collaboration for OER production. This study assesses collaboration needs, identifies social and technical barriers, and builds a collaboration model to facilitate OER production. In doing so, we make thr...

It is difficult to understand students’ social practices from artifacts of anonymous online postings. The analysis of text genres and discursive types of online postings has potential for enhancing teaching and learning experiences of students. This article focuses on analysis of students’ anonymous online postings using Critical Discourse Analysis...

Although there are over a quarter of a million open courses published by an increasing number of universities, it remains unclear whether Open Educational Resources (OER) is scalable and productively sustainable. The challenge is compounded when OER is examined in the light of its potential to allow both educators and learners in developing countri...

It is an ongoing challenge in higher education context to design appropriate learning tasks for students that balances the diversity in student knowledge and variable skills with student’s potential to learn under guidance. Obtaining feedback from students on what they know is made more complicated when students are passive during learning activiti...

While supplementation of face-to-face (F2F) teaching with online engagement is increasingly common, the educators' challenge of teaching F2F personalities and facilitating online personalities has not been widely explored. In this paper, we report on a project in which 1st-year students attended F2F sessions and engaged with an anonymous online que...

Lack of training opportunities for new and practicing health care professionals constitutes a major barrier to patient care in many developing countries. Open Educational Resources (OER) hold the potential to provide more training materials and alternative learning opportunities for health professionals. OER are teaching and learning materials made...

It is difficult to understand students' social practices from artifacts of anonymous online postings. The analysis of text genres and discursive types of online postings has potential for enhancing teaching and learning experiences of students. This article focuses on analysis of students' anonymous online postings using Critical Discourse Analysis...

This paper describes a project which explored the use of Short Message Services (SMS) for examination preparation in a first year Film and Media course at a higher education institution (HEI). During preparation for examination, students study in isolation and become aware of aspects of a course or concepts for which they have questions, but the im...

One of the challenges of teaching large classes is the lack of personal contact with students. The consequence of such distance between lecturer and students is slowness with which lecturers gain insight into learning difficulties and frustration of students. Online collaborative learning tools have been touted as immensely beneficial to enhancing...

One of the most common problems of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education is to base choices on technological possibilities rather than educational needs. In developing countries where higher education is fraught with serious challenges at multiple levels, there is increasing pressure to ensure that technological possi...

Whenever a class is invited to ask questions, it is individual learners who ask and their questions do not often represent the questions of the whole class. The benefit to those present during the questioning session is usually by osmosis. It could be disruptive for several students to interject a question because they want to add to a question ask...

One of the most fundamental facets of learning is the social interaction in which learning is an outcome of individuals sharing experiences. There are three locations where learners perform learning tasks: formal locations such as classrooms or scheduled computer laboratory sessions; semi-formal locations such libraries or walk-in laboratories; and...

South African Universities are tasked with increasing student throughput by offering additional academic support. A second task is to teach students to challenge and question. One way of attempting to achieve these tasks is by using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The focus of this paper is to examine the effect of using an ICT tool...

Although current literature on learning styles shows that matching a teacher’s instructional style with the learning styles of students affects performance in a classroom environment, little is known about the influence of learning styles in online interaction. The paper argues that students’ individual learning styles influences how students inter...

Mentoring or social support is location and time independent. Although tutors and learners encounter problems that may need immediate attention and are time-driven, the lack of social presence awareness makes it difficult to provide them with context sensitive and anywhere, anytime support as they traverse varied locations. Our conceptual model is...

While many scholars at institutions of higher learning are communicatively competent with mobile phones' short message services (SMS), the competence has not been sufficiently exploited for educational purposes. Communicative competence is one of the foremost objectives of education. It is therefore odd that despite the pervasive use of mobile tech...

This paper describes an evaluation of a web-based consultation space (a dynamic frequently asked questions environment - DFAQ) in which learners consult one another using questions, and in which both the flow of interaction and its artefacts become a resource available to a community of learners. The DFAQ is a special form of a Computer-Mediated-Co...

This paper describes an evaluation of a web-based consultation space (a dynamic frequently asked questions environment - DFAQ) in which learners consult one another using questions, and in which both the flow of interaction and its artefacts become a resource available to a community of learners. The DFAQ is a special form of a Computer-Mediated-Co...

Access to the textual world of academia requires that learners are familiar with the critical open-ended questioning stance demanded by textual-ity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that learners registered for the Bachelor of Education Honours degree are unable to generate appropriate ques-tions to interrogate academic text, impacting on their ability...

This article describes a web-based communicative space (a Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions environment—DFAQ) in which learners consult one another using questions, and in which both the flow of interaction and its artefacts become a resource available to a community of learners. Anecdotal evidence suggests that learners embarking on their first y...

2 Multimedia Education Group, University of Cape Town. Email: dngambi@ched.uct.ac.za

It is time consuming and labour intensive to administer and manage tutorials in large classes. It is also time consuming and labour intensive to design and implement efficient computer based tutorial systems that reduce the administrative burden of managing such tutorials. Building interactive computer based tutorials from components that come with...

In this paper, the authors describe the use of question-based chat rooms to negotiate dynamic meanings associated with questions in nonstatic knowledge environments. Meanings associated with questions are themselves nonstatic and when these questions are coupled with nonstatic contexts in nonstatic knowledge environments; extraction of meaning from...

In this paper we describe the social challenges of using computers to teach socially disadvantaged groups in the new South Africa. The majority of people from low socio-economic backgrounds are Africans. There is evidence that these learners perceive good education as a redress to their plight. As a result of this perception, students from historic...

In this paper an ongoing research into dynamic intelligent handler of frequently asked questions (FAQs) is described. Although, the use of FAQs is widely used, there is no evidence that most FAQs contain frequently asked questions. This doubt arises due to the lack of a count of the number of times particular questions are asked; lack of indicators...

In this paper we describe the use of data mining techniques on frequently referenced questions (FRQ) to predict the user's 'next' question with the view to pre-empting the question using proactive response. Relationships and patterns hidden in frequently asked questions (FAQ) lists, once discovered, can be used to anticipate user questions and enri...

Most students are communicatively competent with SMS (short message service) texting. To the extent that SMS is text based and academic discourse is mainly text, it seems reasonable to exploit the communicative competence of SMS for teaching and learning. This paper discusses a project in which the communicative competence of SMS texting among stud...

It is a difficult task to assess the quality of an interpretive educational technology research. As the field of educational technology emerges, there is an increasing need for guidelines on how to conduct an interpretive research and assess its quality. Although interpretive research enriches the understanding of a social phenomenon, the prevalenc...

While collaborative learning (CL) increases learning opportunities among participating members of a group, it is a non-trivial task for a teacher to know what kind of learning occurs. Proponents of CL claim that active exchange of ideas within small groups increases interest, promotes critical thinking, learning takes place. etc. However, there has...

Introduction: Although Short Message Services (SMS) (texting) broadcasting is an efficient and effective way of communicating with students, the disruption caused by the unexpected arrival of messages has not been explored. This paper reports on a project investigating the disruptive effect of messages sent to 782 Health Sciences' students at a hig...

There is currently a disjuncture between evidence in literature linking student interaction to student learning and what obtains in practice. This paper is premised on the argument that students do not ask questions in face to face classroom sessions and therefore there is usually less interaction in class. The problem is compounded when students c...

Lecturers are faced with a dilemma between teaching students skills to recall and reiterate what is taught, or skills to challenge and question things. Traditionally, education systems have taught theories and facts with set answers but the information age requires that we teach students a never-ending quest for new questions and insights. This pap...