Résumé
With the emergence of Covid-19 in South Africa in March 2020 and the subsequent lockdown restrictions, traditional universities looked to the University of South Africa for best practices regarding online teaching and learning. The Covid-19 lockdowns resulted in thousands of pre-service teachers in South African universities and colleges shifting and having to adapt at short notice to online learning. The outbreak caused students and lecturers to be thrust into online learning and teaching situations, with most of them having no prior training or preparation for the shift. For lecturers, the shift to online teaching represented monumental pedagogical and technical challenges, as they were expected to adopt and adapt to an online modality while rapidly learning to use various tools and maintaining the academic integrity of their institutions and modules. This chapter presents the autoethnographic experiences of four University of South Africa lecturers relating to teaching and administering learning and assessments for mathematics education modules. Within the qualitative research approach, we use a collaborative autoethnographic reflexivity approach to demonstrate the intersections between university society and self;the particular and the general;the personal and the politics of knowledge in the context of 4IR and the Covid-19 pandemic. Our experiences of online teaching and learning made us realise that the training of successful and effective mathematics teachers in online spaces during the pandemic is a complex and dynamic task, marked by issues of social justice, quality, equity, and academic inclusion, especially in a country as unequal as South Africa. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
Résumé
The digital revolution is the widespread diffusion of information and communication technologies and transformation into an entirely digitised society. The study aimed to investigate the extent of mathematics teachers' readiness for online education in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and COVID-19 psychologically, sociologically, environmentally, financially, and concerning human resources and content in the case of two selected universities in Ethiopia. Many educational institutions were obliged to transition to an online method of teaching and learning because of the lockdowns implemented in many countries to combat the epidemic. The study used a quantitative research method to investigate the university's e-readiness of e-learning in the 4IR). The study participants were purposively selected from mathematics departments in the two universities. The study's literature review reveals that both 4IR and COVID-19 bring new teaching opportunities in education sectors known as e-learning. The Chapnick Readiness Model (2000) was used to determine the findings. The study found that while teachers' are ready psychologically, sociologically, environmentally, and financially, and regarding human resources and content were moderate. They lacked knowledge of 4IR in all these categories. Most teachers are far from mastering 4IR knowledge and skills. The study reveals a lack of e-readiness of teachers toward technology due to a lack of teachers' training during their degrees, a lack of training on e-learning, technical support on e-learning, and a course for using e-learning. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
Résumé
The study aimed to investigate Ethiopian university lecturers' readiness to use technology for teaching mathematics at the tertiary level during the COVID-19 pandemic when they were compelled to adapt to distant education. Using Google Forms, online questionnaires were distributed to 41 lecturers in three Ethiopian universities, of whom eighteen participated. Before the research, the questionnaire was piloted with eight lecturer participants to categorise questions and validate the instrument using the Rasch measurement model. The questionnaire was locally developed based on guidelines from the literature. It purposed to investigate university lecturers' individual preparedness for technological instruction in terms of their knowledge, beliefs and current, and historical exposure to this mode of instruction. As a counterbalance, some circumstantial factors influencing their readiness were investigated too. Lecturers' optimistic beliefs about using educational technologies have been found to contrast with some disabling circumstantial factors. This study revealed that the lecturers were generally able and interested in integrating technology into the teaching process but that barriers, primarily at the institutional level, hindered them from doing so. In addition to the technologies suggested in the questionnaire, participants enriched the research findings by adding more possible technologies that lecturers may use for educational purposes. The data was analysed using WINSTEPS (Student Version of WINSTEPS 4.7.0.0) and SPSS version 20. The results showed the reliability of using the instrument was 0.77 based on Cronbach's alpha. The PT-measure correlation value determined the construct validity (PMC), ranging from 0.23 to 0.71 except item PUT15's infit and outfit MNSQ between 0.1 to 1.86 and ZSTD range -1.05 to 1.61, which was acceptable. The fit statistics showed that the person separation index, 1.97, was considered good and that the item separation index, 0.63 was within an acceptable range. Person and item reliability were at 0.8 and 0.28, respectively. The result indicated that the new instrument with five items after eliminating unfit items (such as items FAT19, PTT10, KDT1, PTT8 and PTT 12) was reliable and valid to measure the use of technology in the teaching and learning process of the university lecturers.