Mobile Technology for Innovative Teaching and Learning in Tanzanian Higher Education.

Abstract

Tanzania is a country where teaching and learning mode remains mainly face-to-face in classrooms, where both teachers and students discuss and exchange learning contents verbally, using a blackboard or whiteboard. The teaching also involves exchanging manual copies between students and teachers and among students. However, global economy requires educational programmes to shift from traditional approaches to curriculum reforms that consider the development of a knowledge-based and skill-based society that can solve different challenges. Thus, a shift toward the use of mobile technologies to enhance activities in different sectors has been naugurated, including education, specifically in higher education institutions (HEIs). The motivation for using mobile technologies is based on the ready availability of portable devices, the Internet, use of online applications and the learning management systems (LMS). In Tanzania, the Students’ Academic and Registration Information System (SARIS) LMS has been introduced to HEI teachers over the past decade to facilitate secure communication and academic information sharing. However, LMS utilization in HEIs has remained low due to inadequate training and the failure of the system’s core functionalities to tackle the problems faced by students and teachers. Consequently, students and teachers have retained the use of hard copies of teaching notes, tests, quizzes, and assignments, despite the LMS. However, the use of these traditional teaching and learning tools hampers the fluent sharing of educational contents among teachers and students and fosters hard-to-correct errors in examinations and tests. Thus, the need for innovative teaching and learning has been highlighted, so that the online sharing of teaching and learning related materials, supporting the self-regulated learning (SRL) for all students of the four campuses of CBE, also, smooth online administration of examinations for teachers could be achieved to improve education quality and reduce educational-related challenges. These issues have been incompletely researched in the academic literature in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly regarding the stand of involving end-users as co-designers of solutions. To tackle these challenges, a mobile educational tool (MET) prototype, CBEMET, was developed which enables teachers and students to share relevant educational material online, conduct mobile training, engage students in an online collaboration, support SRL, and improve teaching and learning approaches. As a representative HEI, the research was conducted at the College of Business Education (CBE) which is among 567 HEIs found in Tanzania, and one that uses SARIS and Moodle LMS in its education related operations. The co-design and subsequent development of the CBEMET prototype, as an artefact, had followed the combination of activity theory (AT) (Kuuti, 1996) and the four-cycle model of design science research (DSR) (Drechsler and Hevner, 2016). The design cycle of DSR comprises five iterative design stages namely, the problem explication, requirements definition, design and development, demonstration, and finally the evaluation (Johannesson and Perjons, 2014). The four-cycle DSR model considers the impact of the artefact solution on its wider societal context beyond its application environment. In this study, AT, as proposed by Kuuti (1996), was applied by defining activity as the actions that the end users engaged in throughout the five design stages of DSR, from definition of requirements up to co-evaluation of the CBEMET prototype. During the first iteration of the design cycle, teachers, researchers, and developers were involved in defining requirements and codesigning a draft prototype interface; during the second iteration, students were also involved in prototype re-design and co-evaluation. The resulting prototype was demonstrated to the end-users and was followed by two coevaluation rounds: first, with the teachers who did participate earlier in the initial co-design of the CBEMET interface and second, with representative teachers and students from all four CBE campuses. During the co-evaluation, the prototype was used by teachers and students to exchange and share various educational resources to support the innovative teaching as well as the learning. Major outputs of the study (detailed chronologically by six academic publications, indicated by PI, PII, PIII, PIV, PV, and PVI) show that in the end prototype genuinely enabled sharing of educational resources while fostering close and exciting academic collaborations among teachers themselves and between teachers and students. likewise, while the prototype has promoted the sharing of educational resources among the students on all four campuses of CBE, it has enhanced their SRL. Furthermore, the prototype has supported a step ahead in the modernization of higher education, so that the dominant face-to-face mode of education has now been enhanced by online education where there was not a suitable face-to-face solution. This study’s contribution is also highlighted in its application of the DSR framework combined with the AT and the four-cycle information system (IS) DSR. The four-cycle model of IS DSR is handling the dynamic nature of developed prototype in the wider societal context in which the trigger for this artefact design development starts.