ERIC Number: EJ1398463
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0258-2236
EISSN: EISSN-2519-593X
Perspectives on Dialogue and Care in Teaching, Learning Relationships in an Ever-Changing Online Higher Education Landscape
Perspectives in Education, v41 n2 p134-150 2023
This article explores whether pedagogies of dialogue and care are evidenced in how lecturers engage online with their students in teaching and learning on Learning Management Systems (LMSes). Many lecturers in the online higher education landscape predominantly come from affluent educational habitus, whereas many students come from working-class backgrounds. Many students struggle with internet connectivity, the cost of mobile data, as well as software and hardware issues that prevent them from accessing quality tertiary education. The South African education and training system is unevenly distributed and has too many barriers to growth for many working-class students from an online learning perspective. All online higher education institutions are responsible for creating teaching and learning outcomes that are achievable for students, as well as empowering them to take part in their own learning, which ought to speak to how these institutions create dialogue and care for students. Moreover, a student's full potential as a person must also be developed when setting the content and standards on LMS platforms like Blackboard. A pedagogy of care as a holistic pedagogy emphasises the relationship between the lecturer and the student (social consciousness). An interpretivist paradigm was employed in this study. Identified outcomes for the use of LMSes exploring staff's engagement with students through Blackboard were employed in a recent academic article based on a project done by the University of the Free State's Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL). From this quantitative document, an analysis was made by the researcher to sustain the following three broad themes. These include lending support to students participating in online teaching and learning, supporting students in building relationships on online teaching and learning platforms and the challenges faced by lecturers in caring for students in online teaching and learning. The most obvious finding to emerge from this study is that social class plays an active role in the decision-making in the online teaching and learning process, as lecturers are the unwitting tools of the ruling class. This is foregrounded in whether pedagogies of dialogue and care are evidenced in how lecturers engage online with students on LMS platforms such as Blackboard. Important observations are noted and can be summarised as follows: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), if managed by online and higher education spaces, could potentially be a landscape where the nature of the relationship between lecturer and student is neither docile nor self-gratifying. Instead, such a relationship has the potential to be transformative because teaching and learning should empower working-class students to become successful graduates.
Descriptors: Online Courses, Learning Management Systems, Teaching Methods, Learning Processes, Outcomes of Education, Internet, Access to Education, Caring, Teacher Student Relationship, Higher Education, College Faculty, College Students, Social Differences, Costs, Computer Software, Access to Computers, Working Class, Barriers, Holistic Approach, Social Class, Decision Making, Student Empowerment, Power Structure, Foreign Countries
University of the Free State Faculty of Education. P.O. Box 339, Bioemfontein 9300, South Africa. Tel: +27-51-401-2368; e-mail: PiE@ufs.ac.za; Web site: https://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/pie/index
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: South Africa
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A