Flip varsity lectures for equal success

A laptop for every first-year will help prepare students for the fourth industrial revolution

In the national discussion over tuition fees, access and success rates of university students, and decolonisation, one aspect of modern education that deserves more attention is technology: how it is changing our world and how educational institutions can equip graduates to be competitive in this new digital world.

I recently attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, where the umbrella theme was the fourth industrial revolution — robotics, self-learning machines, nanotechnology, genome research and other innovations that were the themes of science fiction when I was a student. This is the world we must prepare new graduates to enter, and where we want them to be leaders if we are to ensure South Africa’s competitiveness.

The Global Universities Leaders Forum, which meets annually at the WEF, explored how different universities are doing this and how we can learn from each other, and collectively anticipate the needs of future graduates — and hence adapt our current practices. A key theme is the effect on employment and the risks of a global digital divide — and how we can ensure that students who do not have ready access to those technologies will not be left behind.

The department of higher education and training is funding the Personal Mobile Devices Project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, Sol Plaatje University and the University of the Free State, to support students who do not already have access to these devices. Johannesburg, Wits and Cape Town universities, for instance, have tested the use of entrylevel tablets in specific learning programmes.

Blended learning is gaining widespread adoption in education. It combines traditional classroom methods with digital media. Students can access the materials available online to learn more effectively when they are away from their face-to-face activities such as lectures, tutorials and in laboratories.

Building a personal relationship with lecturers and classmates is valuable for exchanging ideas and raising questions. Often, large classes in particular can be more effectively delivered online where students can pause and recap sections, go at their own pace, and where the lecture can be constructed with quizzes along the way, so that one only moves on to a new section when the previous section has been understood.

At UCT we have “flipped the classroom” in first-year statistics, with the lectures delivered online and the workshops face to face. This has dramatically