Online short course for learning management system training in an African university of technology

Abstract

[EN] With the use of technology in the classroom growing every year, lecturers are expected to blend facilitations by making use of learning management systems. At the Central University of Technology, Free State this poses a problem for the learning designers in charge of training lecturers in educational technologies as there is limited space and time to not only teach lecturers the skills, but also to apply them in their own contexts. The purpose of this paper is to present participant perspectives of an online short course in which they learned how to use Blackboard and other educational technologies needed for blending teaching and learning. An exploratory design was implemented with descriptive statistics involving quantitative analysis of the collected data to determine the participants’ perspective on their skills gained. An online survey tool was used to collect the data. Eighty-four percent of particpants felt that they were able to communicate via the system’s announcements, 82% felt confident that they would be able to customize the space and 94% felt that they were now able to add content, such as files. When asked if they felt like they learned the skills they expected from the online course, 94% of particpants replied positively.