Abstract:

Since the President of South Africa announced the 21 days lockdown as a measure to control the spread of COVID-19, management had to respond creatively to come up with solutions to this challenge. All the universities and post-school institutions in the country were closed on 18 March 2020 as indicated by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. The shutdown of universities in South Africa is not the first of its kind. In 2017, South African 27 universities experienced students’ protests known as #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall. The rise of online learning and blended learning was experienced to complete the academic year. Instructional designers supported lecturers to embrace these teaching strategies. It is argued that in China where the COVID-19 pandemic began, lecturers were also introduced to online learning, but students’ commitment to learning was not as high. Lecturers were not sure whether students were taking their studies seriously.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of remote or online learning to unblock the minds of the students during the COVID-19 outbreak and the lockdown in one of the Universities of Technology in South Africa. Participants in this study were all the lecturers from two Faculties and one instructional designer responsible in these Faculties. A mixed-method approach was applied. Data were collected by means of reports downloaded from the IMFUNDO learning management system, communication between lecturers and students, lecturers’ WhatsApp community of practice groups as well as the weekly survey feedback. Quantitative data was analysed using the LMS report. Atlas-ti was used to analyse the qualitative data. The results show that lecturers indicated that teaching online was a challenge, but exciting too; they had to adapt to remote or online teaching. Some of the lecturers were concerned about Internet access or data. Lecturers had to use their own data and they indicated that their students complained about lack of data to access IMFUNDO. It is recommended that lecturers must be empowered to develop their learning material online and use various tools available on IMFUNDO.

Keywords:

COVID-19, online learning, flexible learning, emergency remote learning, instructional designer, support.