Saide Current Awareness
21 November 2023

 

Distance Education

• Some reflections on the future of open and distance education following ICDE conference Source: TonyBates.Ca  Tony Bate's recent blog post on the  ICDE 2023 conference in Costa Rica which he writes "has prompted me to think about the future of open and distance educatio+
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• Distance education and work–family conflict during COVID-19: Evidence from Turkey for a gender-moderated model Source: International Review of Education As in much of the world, during the COVID-19 pandemic Turkey switched to mandatory distance education at all formal educational levels, and teachers were required to work from home. Despite the flexibility of working from home, infrastructural challenges adversely affected the effectiveness and quality of teaching and boosted work–family conflict (WFC), creating compatibility issues between teachers’ work and family roles. The study presented in this article used structural equation modelling to explore the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between infrastructural and distance education-related challenges and WFC among teachers in Turkey. 

 

 Education: South Africa 

• SA schools still plagued by ‘historical infrastructure backlogs’, overcrowding – Equal Education report Source: Daily Maverick Finding a ‘correlation’ between poor infrastructure and quality of education, an Equal Education report calls for education authorities to eradicate infrastructure backlogs.
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• Blade Nzimande U-turns on move to place Unisa under administration Source: TimesLive Minister of higher Education, science and innovation Blade Nzimande on Friday announced he was withdrawing the notice to place the troubled University of South Africa (Unisa) under administration.
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• Education department confirms error in matric science paper Source: TimesLive For the second year in a row, grade 12 pupils have had to answer a matric exam paper that had an error. 
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• The sombre stories of pupils at rural government schools Source: TimesLIve A podcast documentary which explores issues such as drug use at primary schools and a school with only two teachers for nine subjects and seven grades
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• South African students' long walk for education Source: Youtube AP Archive The South African government's policy is for students who live more than three kilometres from school be provided with transport. However, more than 200-thousand school students in the KwaZulu-Natal province have to walk for hours to get to school.
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• Abuse and suicide, the spectre that haunts elite boys’ schools: Parktown Boys’ High (Part Two) Source: The Daily Maverick When it comes to sexual abuse, grooming and physical brutality, what happens in school doesn’t always stay in school. For many boys, the trauma they experience in their elite schools indelibly changes their lives and can lead to their eventual death.
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• South Africans climb the educational ladder to nowhere Source: Financial Mail Recent generations of South African children have been increasingly successful in exceeding their parents’ level of education. But the poor quality of much public education means that spending more years at school isn’t a golden ticket out of poverty

 

Language, Literacies and Research Writing

• South Africa’s literacy crisis: our app could help young readers by using home language and English Source: The Conversation Literacy changes lives: in Unesco’s words, it “empowers and liberates people, … reduces poverty, increases participation in the labour market and has positive effects on health and sustainable development”.But in South Africa, 8 out of 10 children cannot read for meaning by the end of their third school year.

 

Open Education and Open Educational Resources

• What Is Open Science? An Intro, Common Misconceptions and Advice Source: NC State University In January, the United States government declared 2023 the Year of Open Science. At NC State University’s Center for Geospatial Analytics, our researchers have been doing open science for years. Yet, misconceptions about the term remain among the scientific community. What exactly is meant by “open science”? And how can a scientist be sure their (and others’) research is as “open” as they think it is?

 

Post Schooling

• As NSFAS funding balloons, higher education budget cuts will strangle SA severely in the long term Source: The Daily Maverick While the National Student Financial Aid Scheme is an obvious good, the fact that this grant greatly exceeds other social grants provided by the state means that many students support their whole family on their NSFAS funding.
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• South African university students use AI to help them understand – not to avoid work Source: The Conversation Students are not adopting digital and AI-powered tools uncritically finds a study of undergraduate students at five South African universities: the University of Cape Town, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Stellenbosch University, Rhodes University, and the University of the Witwatersrand.
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• University council to implement governance recommendations Source: University World News The council of South Africa’s University of Cape Town says it’s ready to implement the recommendations of an independent panel which probed governance matters at the institution between 2018 until last year, writes Ntuthuzelo Nene for Eye Witness News.
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• Gender-based violence at HE institutions worrying – Minister 
  South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training said the scourge of gender-based violence at tertiary education institutions is worrying, reports Faizel Patel for The Citizen.Source: University World News 
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• This comes after a female student was stabbed at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, allegedly by her husband. In a video that went viral on various platforms, an adult male is shown stabbing a female student repeatedly.
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• South African academics condemn Israel’s Gaza war Source: University World News Outrage about the situation in Gaza is growing in academic circles in South Africa, judging by the proliferation of critical pronouncements about the unfolding crisis in Palestine.Thousands of individuals in South Africa’s higher education sector have taken a public stand against Israel’s war in Gaza, imploring related bodies and institutions in South Africa to do the same.

 

Skills and Employment 

• Tech school trains visually impaired students on cyber security, bridging unemployment gap Source: Youtube CTGN Africa Reports indicate that globally, one in every 200 coders is blind or visually impaired. In South Africa, where the digital gap is wide, innovative and inclusive education projects are changing perceptions. Blind and visually impaired students from across South Africa are bridging this gap at the Hein Wagner Academy in Worcester, in the Western Cape by being trained in cyber security.

 

Teaching and Learning- Local and Global

• Policy complexity and school curricula: A case for openness in the education system Source: NBA Education systems around the world have traditionally been characterized by closed knowledge systems, overly prescriptive curricula, narrow conceptions of success and achievement, and a failure to fully empower teachers as facilitators of learning. This inhibits their ability to develop a full spectrum of human learning capabilities amongst learners, especially in their formative schooling years. This paper argues that, while there may be various reasons for these issues, one critical problem is that many education systems are inhibited by complex policy environments that, most likely unintentionally, impede meaningful learning and create educational closure.
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• Using Linear and Non-linear Teaching Strategies to Meet the Multiple Learning Needs of Students  Source: Faculty Focus We make sense of the world around us by using a variety of internal lenses. Our learning may be more abstract than concrete, more right-brain than left-brain, more visual processing than auditory or kinesthetic, etc. We may lean towards one political party or ideological cause over another. And depending on whether we are night owls or early risers, we may be half asleep or raring to go when the alarm clock rings each morning. With so many perspectives, how can instructors meaningfully address them in college or university classrooms? A systems approach offers a bimodal solution.
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• Which Is Better, Active Learning or Lecture? It’s Not So Simple. Source:The Chronicle Students whose STEM courses are taught using active learning perform better than those taught with traditional lectures. That was the top-line finding of a widely cited 2014 meta-analysis, and it has been borne out in many other studies since. While research suggests that lecturing remains the dominant form of STEM instruction, the studies on active learning have bolstered high-profile calls for change that a growing number of instructors have taken to heart in recent years. A new paper suggests, however, that those studies are not as solid, nor their findings as clear-cut, as active-learning proponents would like.
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• Health professionals need to collaborate. Changing how they’re taught helps build that skill  Source: The Conversation  Lecturers in the Interprofessional Education Unit at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa reprt on their study as they tracked the development of students doing the first-year interprofessional theoretical module called Primary Health Care.

 

Technology-Enhanced Learning

• Creative and critical engagement with AI in education Source: AI Pedagogy.Org A collection of assignments and materials inspired by the humanities, for educators curious about how AI affects their students and their syllabi
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• AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion Among Teachers Source:GoogleDocs Anna Mills has created a GPT app that suggests 2-3 sources,  in response to each user question, from the growing resource list she curates on AI in higher Ed.
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• Towards social generative AI for education: theory, practices and ethics Source: LEARNING: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE This opinion paper explores educational interactions involving humans and artificial intelligences not as sequences of prompts and responses, but as a social process of conversation and explora-tion.
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• Guide, Don’t Hide: Maximizing Course Assignments with ChatGPT Integration Source: Faculty Focus  While ChatGPT seems to have sprung up overnight to dominate current headlines, legislative discussions, and professional debates—ranging from doomsday predictions to practical celebrations related to improved efficiency with menial labor tasks—the introduction of this online Artificial Intelligence (AI) program can be traced back to 2018. And while it is just the latest in a seven decades-old history of AI and Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) that can generate content like text, images, music, etc., in response to user prompts, there is no ignoring the flurry of both concerns and hopes for its use in a variety of professional fields.