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Welcome to my blog! This is a space to store / collect / share what I am busy with in my professional life. There are links to the research projects I am busy with, my publications, but also my teaching activities, workshops I am facilitating or presentations I am giving.

If you would like to get in touch, send me an email: gachagod@gmail.com






SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES

Twitter @dgachago17
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Researchgate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniela_Gachago
Academic.edu http://cput.academia.edu/DGachago
Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?user=FIJhSiEAAAAJ&hl=en

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The power of (online) communities of practice

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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...
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Teaching in times of disruption and the ethics of care

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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...
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Why it is so important to move out of your comfort zone once in a while...

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