Page 148 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

Introducing Educational Technology into the Higher Education Environment

PARTNERS@WORK: EMPOWERING EDUCATORS
TO USE TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION

In essence the Partners@Work programme is a professional development programme, extended over
the course of a year, aimed at empowering educators to meaningfully use technology as part of their
teaching and learning practices. The programme focuses on the development and consequent implemen-
tation of well-rounded technology-enhanced courses that address specific challenges such as low pass
rates, geographically dispersed learners and large classes. One of the strengths of the programme is its
underlying focus on action research relating to the use of educational technology.
The Partners@Work programme consists of 4 components. The first component is a capacity-building
empowerment phase that equips lecturers with the skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to successfully
introduce technology into their teaching practices. The next component is a design and development
phase, during which lecturers create technology-enhanced teaching and learning materials. Once the
materials are developed, the third component follows in the form of an implementation phase. In this
phase, lecturers pilot the materials that they developed previously. The final component focuses on re-
search and in this phase lecturers study and report on the impact of their interventions. As a result this
component produces tangible research outputs in the form of journal articles, conference papers and
research posters. The 4 components are shown in Figure 1.
In the section below, each of these components will be unpacked with detail from the Partners@Work
programme, as it was presented at the University of Technology in question.

Preliminaries

A number of activities had to take place before the official launch of each year’s new Partners@Work
programme. A call for nominations typically went out 6 months prior to the launch of a new group.
Interested lecturers then had the opportunity to discuss their wish to participate in the programme with
their Deans and Heads of Departments (HODs), who in turn, had to scan their environments for courses
that could benefit from the introduction of educational technology.

Figure 1. The 4 phases of the Partners@Work programme

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