M. I. Santally

• PhD
• Professor at University of Mauritius

Micro-credentials are certifications that evaluate knowledge and skills acquired through specific learning experiences. This research explores the perceptions of education and industry leaders in Mauritius regarding recognition, ease of application, and value of micro-credentials in higher education. Interviews were conducted with 10 education and...

There has been a growing interest in the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support educators to adapt, use, re-use, remix and recontextualise content for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent and intent of adoption of OER practices and tools in secondary schools in Mauritius within a sustainable and...

Rapid e-learning is a method to develop and deploy quality interactive learning materials in a shorter time span, and to address learning needs in different contexts—academic, professional, or commercial. Resources developed via rapid e-learning methods can be used in educational institutions from pre-primary to tertiary levels. They can also be us...

Immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality (AR/VR/MR) in education have been found to be effective both for the instructors and the students, in general education, in diverse levels and fields. The aim of this paper is to carry out a systematic literature review on the use of AR/VR/MR in education. The objec...

Yearly in Mauritius, only a few Special Educational Needs (SEN) and especially Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) students manage to get a passing mark in French language at elementary level. As at date, literature suggests that there is hardly any French language learning tools connected with pedagogical knowledge and technological tools suitable for...

There has been debates related to online and blended learning from a perspective of learner experiences in terms of student satisfaction, engagement and performances. In this paper, we analyze student feedback and report the findings of a study of the relationships between student satisfaction and their engagement in an online course with their ove...

This paper reports the findings of a research using marks of students in learning activities of an onlinemoduletobuildapredictivemodelofperformanceforthefinalassessmentofthemodule.

This paper reports the findings of a research using marks of students in learning activities of an online module to build a predictive model of performance for the final assessment of the module. The objectives were (1) to compare the performances of students of two cohorts in terms of continuous learning assessment marks and final learning activit...

There has been much debate on the issue of whether online learning was better than traditional education and vice-versa over the past decade. Over time, the concept of blended learning became quite the norm, especially within traditional universities who could no longer turn a blind eye to the educational revolution brought about by information and...

Purpose The University of Mauritius (UoM) established as a traditional face-to-face university has been engaged in distance education since 1993 and in e-learning since 2001 to establish itself as a dual-mode institution. In a context where it has engaged itself to promote its internationalization of online courses and a digital learning transforma...

An overview of technology use in the Sub-Saharan secondary education sector.

The following report discusses the use of Information Communications Technologies (ICTs) to improve access to, quality of, and delivery of secondary education within sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses the policy environment for ICTs in sub-Saharan Africa, their successes, challenges, and lessons learned, and it concludes with a broad and detailed set...

The concept of online learning has witnessed an increase in the higher education sector, where enrolment rates in online courses have significantly grown in recent years. According to the literature, one of the critical components of quality online education is to ensure learner engagement. In short, the need to effectively measure learner engageme...

Presentation made in COL PCF9 conference, on Digital Learning Transformation Roadmaps for Traditional Universities operating in technology-enabled environments.

ICTs are transforming the bricks and mortar institutional delivery methods with virtual and online learning converging to such an extent that the learner can experience anytime, anywhere learning, irrespective of the mode of education that he or she is engaged into. Such learning transactions occur in environments which are extensively data-driven....

It is obvious that with new education technologies, massive open and online courses (MOOCs), and the widespread availability of open educational resources, eLearning is occupying a significant share of the workplace learning for both pre-service training such as employee inductions and for the continuous professional development of staff. Proponent...

The University of Mauritius embarked on the open and distance learning journey in 1993 and engaged in the promotion of distance eLearning and technology-enhanced learning in 2001. The University has moved from a traditional credit system to the learner-centered credit system, inspired by the ECTS model in 2018. Such a model is heavily reliant on im...

This study examines how big data analytics could optimize the use of public funds while ensuring delivery of quality service by public organizations to the citizens of Mauritius. Political Economic Social Technological (PEST) analysis has been carried out to scan the environment to identify at least two major policies and initiatives corresponding...

This paper aims to describe the process of knowledge sharing among countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in view of Capacity Building in Open and Distance Learning (ODL). The main purposes of this project were to contribute to the development and deployment of effective, harmonized open and distance learning (ODL), to incre...

e-Services help in fostering the development of a knowledge society as more citizens and businesses can access, adopt and use government services through online channels. Existing evidence in Mauritius, however, shows low usage of online government services. The goal of this research consisted of developing a framework to guide government agencies...

In this research we studied the correlation between the level of students’ online participation and their overall performances. We examined in this study, the participation level in different learning activities assigned to two large cohorts of learners, and compared them with their final grades at the end of the year. We defined the quality of the...

This article theorises the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organised around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses...

Many higher education institutions today offer online delivery as an alternative or addition to provide more flexibility to learners. However, students being confronted with such services come with different expectations to what that means to their learning paths and behaviours. Learning Analytics is a rather new and innovative way of making studen...

The majority of today's students in online higher education are millennials and have grown up using technology. Therefore, there is a need to determine if their expectations from online learning are different from previous contextual studies and whether or not these vary across gender. This study used a mixed method approach, using focus groups, fo...

The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the African Leadership in ICT (ALICT-LATIC) course delivery model, offered by the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiatives (GESCI) from a quality assurance perspective taking into account the delivery model, cultural context, and the distributed nature of the programme and its partic...

In the 21 st century, with the growing importance of education and the increase use of internet, Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) have become a must amongst learners and instructors. One of the main objectives of these platforms is to implement technology with traditional learning methods so as to enhance the...

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non- human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses...

The Government of Mauritius has introduced tablets in the Secondary Schools in Mauritius in 2014. It is estimated that about 24000 tablets were distributed to students and educators. Secondary school students (Form IV) were given each a tablet, which was introduced as an innovative and revolutionary measure to transform educational practices in Mau...

Full Text available at link below (first come, ..) http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/bMgNzFsIfWHWAdXShVGp/full Higher education institutions consider student satisfaction to be one of the major elements in determining the quality of their programs. The objective of the study was to develop a model of student satisfaction to identify the influencer...

The organization Helping Our People has been setup in 2011 by a team of education professionals working at the Virtual Centre for Innovative Technologies (VCILT) at the University of Mauritius. In 2009, the VCILT embarked on the SIDECAP project, funded by the EU-ACP in a consortium regrouping the Open University of the UK, the University of the Wes...

A Living Lab is an environment for user-centered innovation, based on the observation of every-day user practice and experience for solving problems, but also based on their active participation, with an approach that facilitates their influence in the open and distributed innovation process (participatory design). According to the European Network...

Investigating the prevalence of Internet addiction disorder among Mauritian students at tertiary level seems to be appropriate, especially at a time when Internet access cost is becoming cheaper and number of user is, consequently, growing. This research, structured with an initial preliminary investigation about online behaviors of tertiary stu...

This article looks at the evolution of e-learning at the University of Mauritius from a practitioner’s perspective. The main approach is action research and the main methods used are experiential reporting, desk studies, and practice-based evaluation. It critically assesses the extent to which the objectives have been achieved and the transformatio...

Personalisation of e-learning environments is an interesting research area in which the learning experience of learners is generally believed to be improved when his or her personal learning preferences are taken into account. One such learning preference is the V-A-K instrument that classifies learners as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. In this...

In Mauritius, during the 2000-2005 period, the government came up with the idea of an open-learning institute which would have the mandate of promoting open education in the country. The idea later evolved into that of an Open University in 2005 but it never came into operation, until a revamped bill was presented in 2010 in Parliament. The questio...

In Mauritius, during the 2000-2005 period, the government came up with the idea of an open-learning institute which would have the mandate of promoting open education in the country. The idea later evolved into that of an Open University in 2005 but it never came into operation, until a revamped bill was presented in 2010 in Parliament. The questio...

An E-Portfolio is a digital collection of works, artifacts, resources, including demonstrations, projects, art works in form of graphics (2D, 3D), accomplishments that represent a student’s work. The concept of e-portfolio has been derived from the traditional portfolios. From a pedagogical viewpoint, the portfolio was meant to improve the assessm...

Studies investigating learning gains in students exposed to synthetic voice audio-narration versus natural voice audio-narration have yielded mixed results. This study was designed to further explore learning gains in an educational setting using synthetic voice audio-narration. The aims of the study were to quantitatively assess learning gains in...

This paper discusses how modern technologies are changing the teacher-student-content relationships from the conception to the delivery of so-called 'distance' education courses. The concept of Distance Education has greatly evolved in the digital era of 21st Century. With the widespread use and access to the Internet, exponential growth has been e...

n 2001, for the University of Mauritius to catch the eLearning bandwagon, the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies (VCILT) was created in bid to modernize the distance education concept by fully utilizing the possibilities offered by IT-enabled networked systems and the Internet. The February 2010 issue of the Commonwealth of Learnin...

The split-attention principle states that, when designing instruction, including multimedia instruction, it is important to avoid formats that require learners to split their attention between, and mentally integrate, multiple sources of information that are separate in temporal or physical dimensions/locations (Mayer 2001). This paper investigates...

Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in Open Educational Resources (OER). A similar trend was observed about a decade ago in the concept of Learning Objects, which inevitably faded without really making an impact in real-world educational contexts. A number of repositories were created that contain thousands of learning objects....

It is postulated that one of the main problems with e-learning environments is their lack of personalisation. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the current work in the field and proposes a framework for research in promoting personalisation in Web-based learning environments. The concepts of adaptability, adaptivity and the limitation...

This paper presents a new technique of delivery of classes—an instructional technique which will no doubt revolutionize the teaching and learning, whether for on-campus, blended or online modules. This is based on the simple task of instructionally incorporating text-to-speech software embedded in the lecture slides that will simulate exactly the d...

It is postulated that one of the main problems with e-learning environments is their lack of personalisation. This article presents a comprehensive review of the current work in the field and proposes a framework for research in promoting personalisation in Web-based learning environments. The concepts of adaptability, adaptivity and the limitation...

Without Abstract

One of the main advantages of delivering web-based educational materials is that the same content is delivered to a number of students and can be accessed with no restrictions of time and place. However, there is a wide belief that using the web as only a new kind of delivery medium for educational materials does not add significant value to the te...

This paper describes the M-E adaptive architecture designed to blend mobile and e-learning in a single integrated computer-based infrastructure. A prototype application has been developed that consists of three main components namely the web-based interface, the mobile access interface, and the adaptation mechanism that is used to provide just-in-t...

In this paper, we present a case study concerning a Masters level course in Computer- mediated communications and pedagogy delivered at the University of Mauritius through e-Learning mode. We provide a brief overview of the program, its rationale and the pedagogical approaches that have been used to design the modules that are delivered in the firs...

The ICZM learning model is based on the constructivism theory and the concepts, principles and procedures of Integrated Coastal Zone Management elaborated so as to further knowledge on critical global and regional aspects in the South Western Indian Ocean through networked learning. Understanding the ways in which students use the unique processing...

Various researches have been conducted on the role and importance of assessment in education as well as its impact on the learner and the overall learning process. In fact, the way assessment is formulated in a particular subject shapes the way students learn. They focus their learning to comply with assessment requirements that they anticipate. In...

This paper describes an emergent collaborative project between the Universities of Reunion (Institut de Recherches en Math?matiques et Informatique Appliqu?es - IREMIA) and Mauritius (Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies - VCILT) to make scientific research results in insular tropical environment available to a wider audience, create...

In this study, we carry out a survey of the preferred learning and perceptual styles of students at the University of Mauritius to find out about their learning preferences. This study forms part of a larger research project (HyperLearn) of the development and evaluation of a web- based adaptive hypermedia system for e-learning which keeps an evolv...

The VCILT Test Centre (http://vcampus.uom.ac.mu/testcentre) is an online assessment and student performance monitoring tool offering academics of the University of Mauritius the opportunity of carrying out curriculum-based multiple choice class tests using automated marking techniques. The ability to administer and score an assessment quickly is on...