E-SERVICE LEARNING PROJECTS IN A COMMUNITY-BASED PROJECT MODULE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA

It is compulsory for higher education institutions in South Africa to become more involved in the social, economic and cultural fabric of the community. Service-learning is the most popular way for higher education institutions to incorporate a social responsibility and awareness of community in the curriculum.

To incorporate service-learning through e-service learning is a new field in South Arica. E-service-learning occurs when the instructional component, the service component, or both are conducted online. E-service-learning frees service-learning from place-based access or geographical constraints. One of the advantages of e-service-learning is that communities can be engaged in a service-learning activity that otherwise may have been unable to participate.

In the compulsory undergraduate module, Community-Based Project module of the Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria more than 1700 students are enrolled in the module and work in on more than 590 projects with more than 400 different community-partners on a yearly basis.

Various e-service-learning projects are incorporated in the module. These projects vary where parts of the projects takes place online, for instance computer training for community members, designing of websites for schools and non-profit organisations, creating applications for cell phones, to projects where both the instruction and service are exclusively online, namely educational YouTube videos and a mathematics project on MXit.

Students experience these projects very rewarding as they can use their already specialised acquired skills to address the needs of the communities. The paper will discuss the module and the successful execution of the different e-service learning projects in the module.