The LMS-Social media dichotomy: Three academic turns

This study set out to explore academics’ experiences in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to teach in a higher education context. As universities transform to fulfil expectations of the knowledge society, it is expected that academics too must follow suit and respond to the dynamic environment that ICT affordances bring to the teaching-learning situation to yield effective and efficient teaching methods. Technology brings forth new opportunities for academics in higher education institutions (HEI’s) to reconfigure the way they conduct their business of facilitating teaching and learning. The rapid pace of change in technology innovation and development demands that HEI’s are always in a state of flux. The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) witnessed the emergence of robot tutors and chatbots, which offers new possibilities for universities to engage with students. This dynamic transition to an ICT intensive environment creates a world of complexity and poses overwhelming challenges for academics to reconceptualise their teaching. To be relevant, academics must acquire additional skills and teaching methods concomitant with ICT integration such as, blended learning, hybrid learning, e-learning, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), flipped classrooms and so forth. Although HEI’s may respond to the need for ICT technical support for academics, the more serious issue is that ICT integration requires academics to reconceptualise their pedagogical practice. Utilising a qualitative research design and case study approach, this study investigates the experiences of academics as they made ICT pedagogic turns for teaching in a resource-constrained contexts. A social-constructivist researcher lens that views knowledge as being socially constructed by individuals to make meaning of their experiences was used as the meta-theoretical paradigm to frame this study. The case is bounded by its particularity to academics at a public university. This qualitative instrumental case study (Stake 2005) attempts to provide insight into the “little understood” phenomenon of social media use by academics. The study was exploratory and thus may or may not be typical of other cases, as focus was on the peculiarity of the case and not intended to draw generalisation of the findings. Data collection methods included semi-structured face-to-face interviews as the main data collection method (Denzin and Lincoln 2011). Classroom observations of academics’ practices were conducted with the researcher as a reactive observer. Both classroom observations and document analysis addressed triangulation of data, to verify what participants say they do may not necessarily be what they actually do in practice (Argyris and Schön 1974). The participant interviews and class observations took place over several months until saturation of data occurred. Member-checking (Creswell 2012) allowed for the researcher to revisit participants to clarify issues captured in transcripts to “check for accuracy” and interpretation. The unit of analysis was represented by the purposeful selection of one academic from each of the seven faculties at Lethlolo University. Research rigour was ensured by means of the following quality criteria: transferability, credibility, dependability, confirmability, and authenticity. Ethics approval to conduct this study was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the relevant Faculty. Davis’s (1993) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) provides the theoretical underpinning for this study, which focuses on two principal attitude constructs namely, ‘perceived ease of use’ (PEU) and ‘perceived usefulness’ (PU) of the technology in the hands of the academic. These two behavioural constructs namely, PU and PEU also directly influence whether actual engagement with the technology will occur. Davis (1993) defines perceived usefulness as the extent to which an academic perceives that their use of the technology would facilitate or enhance their work performance, the emphasis of perceived usefulness (PU) is on improved job productivity and effectiveness. Davis identifies the construct of perceived usefulness as the affordances that ICT brings to teaching The findings of this study are presented as three academic turns. First, the institution’s learning management system (LMS) was fraught with power failures, lack of network connectivity, frequent downtime, and student indifference. The LMS frustrated academics and offered little ‘usefulness’ for pedagogic change, which contributed to the first “turn away” from the use of the LMS. Second, was academics “turn towards” the use of social media tools as an innovative alternative pedagogical approach for curriculum delivery and engagement with students. Third, contrary to the notion that social media is a form of disruptive technology that seemingly has little influence on pedagogy in this study academics’ practice with social media “turned towards” changing their beliefs and attitudes. References • Davis, F. D. (1989). Technology acceptance model: TAM. Al-Suqri, MN, Al-Aufi, AS: Information Seeking Behavior and Technology Adoption, 205, 219. • Davis, F. D., Granic, A., & Marangunic, N. (2024). The technology acceptance model: 30 years of TAM. 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Academic Engagement and Technology: Revisiting the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge Framework (TPACK) in Higher Education (HE)--The Academics' Perspectives. iafor Journal of Education, 5, 133-159.