Old dogs and new e-tricks: staff development in a South African tertiary institution

This paper reports on a study in progress at RAU University (RAU) in Johannesburg, South Africa. Participants in the study are online lecturers at RAU who consider themselves to be experienced face-to-face instructors. Since 1998, progressive updates of WebCT^™ have been implemented at RAU to support a growing number of instructors embracing the new multimodal approach to teaching. In many cases, being able to use the available technologies has become a necessity rather than a matter of choice, but even though technology has found general acceptance at RAU, change has come slowly. This study identifies the central role that staff (faculty) can play in this process of change through a process of action research. This process cannot be seen as a top down process, but rather a complex one in which the online instructor is very active. Initial findings have identified that higher education technology strategies ignore the central role that staff (faculty) can play in the change process.