A/Prof Daniela Gachago

Rickett Glenn Waterfalls with my Women's Adventure Club of Centre County, PA hiking buddies      My colleague Alexandra Mihai, an academic staff developer at Maastricht University, who is also doing a Fulbright in the US at the moment, and is also based at the Porvoo Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale, r ecently reflected on her stay . When reading her words, it resonated so much. She listed the following five points as the most important learnings from her stay in the US so far: the power of keeping an open mind the power of connections the power of  changing perspectives the power of a bird's eye view the power of kindness and gratitude I so agree. My stay at PennState was my first sabbatical since becoming an academic, my first break from the South African higher education context in more than 10 years. It reminded me about the importance of moving out of your comfort zone, how refreshing it is to start somewhere new, to discover a new place, new people, new...

The Schreyer Center for Teaching Excellence Its been nearly a month now since I have come back from my three months stint at PennState, where I spent my Fulbright from February - May 2022.  It was such a treat to spend three months in a new environment, on my own. I will reflect in a different post on what I learnt for and about myself during this time, but here I would like to share some of the insights I gained by being embedded in a Centre for Learning and Teaching at a large state-funded College in the States. I have been thinking about this for a while, people have asked me what my observations were, but it took me a while to settle into this process. This morning I woke up and somehow the list was here. So here it is, in no particular order:  The Higher Education Landscape in the US is changing I must admit before joining the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at PennState I didn't know much about the US Higher Education system. What I have learnt, is that it i...

Over the last few months, we have been reflecting on and started to describe our learning experience design model we developed in our work with academics at CPUT. We have adapted the design thinking process to include learning design elements, such as Gilly Salmon's storyboarding exercise and the six ways of learning concept by Diana Laurillard. However, we have been struggling to find a learning design model that represents the iterative nature of learning design and also that emphasises the centrality of the learner, the persona with are developing with and for. Most learning design models are still using a linear presentation, although they talk about iterative steps. One of the most well-known models is the d.school thinking process: Figure 1: d.school design thinking process Others, do try and represent as the design thinking process as a cycle, such as Sarah Gibbon's design thinking process: Figure 2: Sarah Gibbon's Design Thinking process However, none of these repre...

I have just come across this blog post W hat’s next for faculty development?   by Alexandra Mihai and it has strongly resonated with the journey we have gone through over the last few months: from offering webinars and training sessions on using Blackboard and other tools for remote teaching and learning, curating resources and finally creating guidelines / rubrics for lecturers to benchmark their online courses and organising good practice sharing sessions.  Image by Tim Marshall from www.unsplash.com  What caught my attention though is her suggestion around the importance of informal communities of practice to support academics in times of crisis. One of my roles as academic staff developer has been to create networks across the institution of colleagues with a passion for eLearning. We call these our eLearning champions and we have written before about their shared characteristics, what we called an eLearning mindset , very closely related to the design thinking minds...

Post originally published on http://heltasa.org.za/designing-learning-in-unsettling-times/ by Daniela Gachago and Xena Cupido Responding to COVID-19 As the world braces for an onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have taken drastic measures to curb the spread of the virus.  These measures have included government-mandated lockdowns, which requires citizens to stay at home in an effort to quell the spread of the disease. Currently, in South Africa, we find ourselves in a state of suspension. The country has literally come to a “stand-still” with only essential services in operation. This has resulted in school and university closures as part of the effort to contain this global pandemic.  According to Unesco (2020) monitoring, approximately 14 612 546 South African learners have been impacted by this nation-wide closure, of which 1 116 017 are university students. In an effort to continue with the academic project, universities across the globe are c...

I follow with huge interest how universities worldwide are moving their teaching and learning online. I am fascinated by how fast they move, how well prepared they seem (at least from afar) and mostly, how uncritical they are about issues of access and social justice when it comes to online learning. Here at in South Africa, and in particular at CPUT, any attempt to introduce online or even blended learning has to be mindful of our learners, often not able to access digital resources from home, or not necessarily digitally literate enough to follow this kind of learning. I see very little critical engagement at the moment from around the world, with the exception of articles such as shared a few days ago on Facebook: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online , by Rebecca Barett-Fox. So far she is the one of the few who considers how students might be differently positioned, as she writes: "They will be accessing the internet on their phones. They have limited data. They...