Conference Papers

Permanent URI for this collection

http://10.253.9.46:4000/handle/11622/26

Browse

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Corporate social investment - bridging the digital divide.
(2012) Madhav, Natasha; Payne, Nola
The South African constitution states that "everyone has the right to education". The Skills Development Act which aims to “develop the skills of the South African workforce, improve productivity in the workplace and to promote self-employment” has had a significant impact on learning and the development of our labour force within organizations; however it has had little or no impact in reaching the many disadvantaged communities within South Africa. These communities have limited access to education and often no access to computers and the internet. The schools that do have access to technology often have limited resources. The current African National Congress (ANC) government supports the efforts by the private sector to channel finances and resources into the disadvantaged communities to improve the provision of education to these communities. Many adult learners believe that they are too old to learn how to use computers. This stems from unfamiliarity or fear of computers and technology. In order to assist learners to adapt to new technology, computers have been introduced in adult basic education and training (ABET) programmes. ABET is expected to bring about change by increasing the skills and attitudes of the disadvantaged community to make them employable or to empower them as entrepreneurs. One of the focuses of ABET is educational technology with a specific focus on information technology. The most important indicator of a population’s ability to use information technology is to apply the computer basics. It is necessary to find ways to promote the involvement of communities in computer literacy programmes. Technology learning areas provide learners with technological skills, like computer literacy. The use of technology in the work places, such as faxing, e-mail, and photocopies has replaced many employees’ manual tasks hence the acquisition of technological skills would enhance opportunities from being lower-productive and unskilled to productive high-skilled employees and this in turn will result in an increase in remuneration. Additionally, technology, as an ABET learning area, could also help learners understand technological innovations such as the use of the internet to transact electronically, obtain access to educational sites and to search for employment. The Masakhane Project’s computer literacy programme, a CSI initiative by SABMiller, offers instruction in basic computer skills, the Microsoft Office© Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) and introductory internet usage. The authors examined the learner’s experiences of the ABET computer literacy programme on the Masakhane Project as well as the stakeholder’s contribution and have documented this in the paper. The questions asked of the community and the stakeholders was to determine a more effective and productive way of providing ABET education to achieve computer literacy amongst the community and to determine what and how similar corporate social initiatives can be improved to bridge the digital divide and at the same time improve employability. Keywords: Digital divide, technology, disadvantaged communities, stakeholders, ABET
Meeting industry expectations for entry level information technology employees - a pilot study.
(2012) Payne, Nola;
Considering the relatively large number of unemployed graduates in South Africa (National Treasury, 2011), it is necessary to assess whether Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are adequately meeting the expectations of potential employers. In addition, it is also necessary to gauge the perceptions of students to determine the extent to which HEIs are preparing them to find employment after graduation. The purpose of the study is to test the survey instruments to conduct a wide scale survey to take stock of the views and expectations of employers and their requirements of Information Technology (IT) graduates produced by HEIs and the perceptions of IT undergraduates who are about to enter the job market. The outcome of the test samples will provide guidelines to amend and refine the questionnaires to support a large scale study to effectively establish an empirical benchmark against which periodic future reviews of IT qualifications can be conducted by different HEIs.
BREAKING THE MOULD: A CASE STUDY OF A DIGITAL LEARNING COMMONS IMPLEMENTATION PROJECT
(2016) Van Wyk, B; Kadzenga, I
One of the four brands of a South African higher education institution implemented its first digitally enabled campus in Polokwane, South Africa during 2015, opening its doors to new cohorts for the first time in January 2016. This new Rosebank College campus changed the tertiary landscape by embarking on a different model of education, offering all teaching and learning, as well as support services, in a digitally enabled environment. From a focus on e-learning via the Blackboard Learn Management System (LMS), supported by a number of scheduled contact sessions, to digital library services this digitally enabled campus was designed to cater for a new mode of delivery. In order to cater for the information needs of the new campus, a digital library and information service (LIS) model was required as opposed to the traditional paper-based library service. This new approach is changing the landscape of information services. Valuable lessons were learnt during the planning and implementation of the digital learning commons. In this paper, an overview is provided of how it was planned and implemented, and lessons learnt are shared.
Breaking the Mould: A Case Study of a Digital Learning Commons Implementation Project
(The IIE, 2016-04) Van Wyk, Brenda; Kadzenga, Irvine
One of the four brands of The Independent Institute of Education (The IIE), Rosebank College, implemented its first digitally-enabled campus in Polokwane, South Africa during 2015, opening its doors to new cohorts for the first time in January 2016. This new Rosebank College campus changed the tertiary landscape by embarking on a different model of education, offering all teaching and learning, as well as support services, in a digitally-enabled environment. From a focus on e-learning via the Blackboard Learn Management System (LMS), supported by a number of scheduled contact sessions, to digital library services this digitally-enabled campus was designed to cater for a new mode of delivery. In order to cater for the information needs of the new campus, a digital library and information service (LIS) model was required as opposed to the traditional paper-based library service. This new approach is changing the landscape of information services offered at The IIE. Valuable lessons were learnt during the planning and implementation of the digital learning commons. In this paper, an overview is provided of how it was planned and implemented and lessons learnt are shared.
Business confidence in South Africa: Identifying key domestic drivers and the nature of their inpact.
(2016-09) Maredza, Andrew; Nyamazunzu, Zvikomborero
The primary objective of this paper is to empirically assess the magnitude, direction and significance of the impact of selected domestic macroeconomic fundamentals on business confidence index for the South African economy. This particular focus of the paper comes at a time in the history of the South African economy when the business climate and investor confidence is at its lowest. According to South African Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SACCI, 2016), the business confidence index reached a 22-year low record of 79.6 in December 2015 before slipping further down to its all-time low of 79.3 in May this year. The auto-regressive distributive lag (ARDL) model proposed by Pesaran et al (2001) is employed on quarterly data spanning the period 1975 – 2015 and 2002 – 2015 for two models; total business confidence and financial services business confidence respectively. We attempt to explore the relationship between business confidence and selected domestic macroeconomic indicators. Empirical results showed that real economic growth, interest rate, exchange rate, inflation outlook and stock market performance have significant impacts on business confidence. Hence, our study empirically supports the notion that macroeconomic stability drives business confidence. The results stress the need by the government to ensure that the business environment is conducive for doing business in order to boost business confidence. By instilling and preserving the needed business confidence in the financial sector and the larger economy, growth prospects and aspirations of a country improve.
How visible are we really? A sociotechnical exploration into the sustainability of digital scholarship collections
(COLLNET 2016, 2016-12-05) Van Wyk, Brenda; Du Toit, Adeline
Over and above quality teaching and learning, the status and prestige of higher education institutions depend on the quality, web visibility and accessibility of their research and scholarly communication. Universities and higher education institutions are knowledge intensive environments. Research and scholarship created here are institutional knowledge capital and must be managed as assets, allowing the institutions to derive a competitive edge in research and improved institutional stature. As such, knowledge capital must be managed in a way that will ensure return on investment. Scholarship found in dissertations, theses, proceedings and publications form part of this knowledge capital. Digitised institutional repositories are the preferred method for showcasing scholarship on the internet, thereby adding to the institution’s web visibility. Research repositories developed over the past twenty years to become sophisticated networked digital research collections. Traditional research institutions reap benefits from showcasing scholarship digitally in open access repositories, and peer reviewed academic journals. Institutions with well-developed repositories rank consistently higher on webometric ranking sites, such as Ranking Web of Universities. However, not all higher education institution sectors have benefited equally from repository and scholarship curation developments. Globally, recent research indicates that valuable research output originates from both public and private higher education institutions, but these are not archived and curated sustainably in all circumstances. Web analysis indicates that research done in some comprehensive- and universities of technology, as well as most private higher education institutions in Southern Africa lack web visibility and discoverability. Coincidentally, Southern African private higher education institutions rank significantly lower than comparative public counter parts. Poor scholarship curation and lack of research visibility deter these institutions from taking their rightful place in higher education and higher education research communities. Where research collections are not managed sustainably as knowledge capital, full return on investment will not be possible. Previous reported research focused mainly on technical processes of scholarship curation, and not so much on knowledge management aspects impacting on sustainable curation practices. Building on previous research results, this paper explores a sociotechnical approach to improved sustainability of scholarship curation. This study investigated digital scholarship curation trends in a purposefully selected target group of private and public higher education institutions in Southern Africa. Empirical questionnaire results were triangulated with corresponding webometric ranking analysis pertaining to the target group. Identified gaps in current scholarship curation trends explain the poor web visibility in the target group. Results confirm that there is a lack of awareness and knowledge regarding scholarship curation in the target group. Findings are that particularly private higher education lack understanding of how scholarship curation in open access repositories can benefit their institutional stature and reputation. These trends are reflected in data analysis of these institutions on web ranking databases, where private institutions rank significantly lower. Although public higher education institutions in the target group ranked higher on webometric databases than their private counter parts, here too serious sustainability risk factors have been identified in managing their scholarship in digital research repositories.
Emergency Remote Learning in the Times Of Covid: A Higher Education Innovation Strategy
(Academic Conferences and Publishing International Ltd., 2020) Mooney, G; Duma, M; Faloye, S; Van Wyk, B
Innovation in a time of crisis is not a new concept. Natural disasters and pandemics through the ages have continued to necessitate emergency adjustments on many levels, including education. Globally, the outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the unexpected and wide-spread disruption of society, and in higher education. These challenges call for crisis innovation measures. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced education providers to revert to a pandemic pedagogy as a philosophy underpinning their teaching and learning strategies. The private higher education institution (PHEI) in this study has a distributed federal model, offering undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Education, Law, Commerce, Engineering, Social Sciences and Humanities across 24 campuses. It has nearly 45 000 students in South Africa. The compulsory rolling out of the learning management system (LMS) used by the PHEI understudy across all programmes in 2014 enabled the PHEI to adapt to an emergency remote teaching model. This was done by expanding online synchronous and asynchronous learning to the rest of the programmes by employing a crisis-driven innovation strategy. This extended the blended learning approach. The emergency innovation strategy the PHEI adopted responded to this closure by adapting its existing eLearning strategy into an emergency remote teaching strategy (ERTS). This article reports on the case of a PHEI on the approach followed to adjust to this disruptive change in terms of lecturer preparation. Two important factors stood out: firstly, the need to determine the preparedness of lecturers and eTutors to teach online and remotely only; and, secondly, reaching out to students and reassuring them that their education will continue. This paper reports on the first construct.

Browse

Browsing Conference Papers by Issue Date

Results Per Page

Sort Options