Abstract:

Increased penetration and use of emerging technologies across South Africa’s higher education landscape has encouraged a paradigm shift from traditional teacher-centered practices to learner-centered practices strategies. This has seen a rapid proliferation of digital technology, digital literacies, flexible learning as well as social media across South Africa’s (SA) higher education environment over the last twenty years now meant that academics and students from universities across SA including universities of technology (UoT) had to learn new technological skills required in the current digital world ( Ng'ambi et al, 2016). However, the sudden outbreak of the SARS-Cov-2 virus also known as Covid-19 has inadvertently prompted many academics and other institutions of higher learning to cancel their synchronous face-to-face classes to rushed uptake of asynchronous online teaching and learning (Hodges et al, 2020).

As the study of Hodges et al, (2020) brings to the fore, “the need to "just get it online" resulted in many academics from other parts of the globe including SA rushing the amount of time and effort normally required to prepare asynchronous online course delivery. The amount of time and effort spent in creating online courses in an effort to save the 2019/2020 academic year was in contrast to the usual standard six to nine months planning period required for quality online course planning (Hodges et al,2020). Students developed the mentality of "just get it done and submit " due to the fact that time spent developing online courses by academics at a UoT was very short. These views hold true and are in line with arguments by Hodges et al, (2020), as this points back to the fact that academics rushed their online course preparations resulting in low-quality assessments prompting other academics to view online education as weak. Arguments are that the quality of online education itself in comparison to face-to-face delivery is very weak (Hodges et al, 2020).

A systematic literature review was used to identify journal articles on activity theory and studio-based learning from reputable peer-reviewed online journals in the field of education technology. The inclusion search criteria included terms like ‘blended learning, ‘problem-based, ‘emerging technology’ as well as ‘higher-order thinking’, while the exclusion criteria involved articles that were not written in the English language from non-peer-reviewed journals older than ten years.

Key results from this literature analysis study indicate that although the implementation of blended-learning and emergency remote teaching and learning in our context promised to be a solution to the current Covid-19 pandemic and post Covid-19 future life. It cannot be ignored that academics and learners from poor economic backgrounds were hard-hit by the need to access asynchronous content and will continue to do so in the near future. The cost of data and adequate technological infrastructure to access this material has proved difficult for most learners from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Keywords:

Emerging Technologies, Teacher-Centered, Learner-Centered, Studio-based learning, Activity Theory, University of Technology (UoT), Higher Order Thinking Skills.