Abstract
South African universities are increasing the number of students that are admitted to their degree programs. This came as a result of massification of higher education which in turn reduces student-lecturer interaction and ability to monitor the progress of the student. Lecturers are suing technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the solution to support these large class environments, but seldom make the effort to pedagogically integrate the technology into the teaching and learning environment. This paper investigates to what extent a LMS has been integrated into teaching and learning at a traditional university. This paper will make use of a case study to provide descriptive insight into how a LMS has been integrated into 31 large classes in the past three years dating 2015–2017 at a traditional university. The usage patterns of lecturers making use of the LMS are examined through the user statistics that were collected during this time from course request forms. The results show that the main function of the LMS during the past 3 years was course management. The LMS was used for evaluation and communication purposes, while the collaboration and teaching categories are still underdeveloped. The recommendation is then that lecturers are encouraged to properly integrate a LMS into their teaching pedagogy, and not simply use it as a management tool.
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Cilliers, L., Ntlabathi, S., Makhetha, P. (2017). A User Study About the Usage of a Learning Management System in a South African University. In: Huang, TC., Lau, R., Huang, YM., Spaniol, M., Yuen, CH. (eds) Emerging Technologies for Education. SETE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10676. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71084-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71084-6_5
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