ICT Enhanced Learning in Higher Education

All over the world, teacher-centred pedagogy is prominent. Teachers talk and students are directed to listen. The assumption is that learners are empty or are just passive observers. Yet, in explaining the way learners get, organise and apply knowledge and skills; behavioural, constructivist, developmental and social learning theories and practices reveal that teacher-centred approach to delivering subject contents is impotent for producing the calibre of graduates the twenty-first century society and beyond need. 
 

In summary, these theories point to the following:

(1) Learners should be active participants in planning and evaluating what they learn;

(2) Learners are most interested in subjects that are immediately relevant to personal life and employment;

(3) Learners learn better when they are exposed to solving real life problems than when they are exposed only to theoretical course contents;

(4) Knowledge is constructed from experiences;

(5) Learners prefer learning new contents based on their existing knowledge and experiences to learning completely strange contents.

All the five statements place the learner at the centre of the instructional method that must enable twenty-first century students to acquire needed skills, including two advanced skills stipulated by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2007. The two advanced skills are the skill of expert thinking and the skill of complex communication. Expert thinking is the ability to solve problems that lack explicit rules-based solutions, unlike algebra. The skill of complex communication is the ability to make effective oral and written arguments, eliciting information from others. These two skills are embedded in information, visual, and technological literacy which are rarely acquired through teacher-centred pedagogy.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have always strived to justify their existence as centres of excellence. To earn this justification, HEIs have a duty to guide students to adequately acquire information, visual, and technological literacy. This requires a shift to student-centred, project-based teaching and collaborative learning in all programmes. Can ICTs help at all to achieve this? Which particular ICTs can be used successfully, and how can they be deployed? http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=1868