Daniela Gachago, an Associate Professor at the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology is thrilled to have secured a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research in the United States.

In her quest to both broaden and deepen her research and to promote innovation in teaching and learning at CPUT and beyond, Gachago will be based at Pennsylvania State University also known as PennState University. The focus of her research is to understand how innovation happens in institutions of higher learning.

“We are looking at how design thinking has been adopted, used, and adjusted for higher education across different institutions and contexts,” she says.

Gachago is particularly interested in how design thinking can support academic staff development. She is working with eLearning champions across different faculties. In the past, her research, displayed what she calls an ‘eLearning mindset’, which is characterised by a focus on learners’ needs, a desire to collaborate, a penchant for risk-taking and experimentation, and most importantly, a shared concern not to see problems as stumbling blocks but an opportunity to innovate.

“In the project proposal I submitted to Fulbright, I would like to explore whether and how one can promote this mindset in academic staff development…I am excited about the opportunity to spend some time in the US,” Gachago remarks.

The period has been postponed from August 2020 to January 2021. “Let’s hope we can travel by then. It’s difficult to imagine that this lockdown will be over at one point.”

She is going to continue working on her research on innovation and academic staff development by exploring how Pennsylvania State University supports the teaching and learning project, with a particular focus on the integration of technology in teaching and learning. “PennState has a huge network of instructional designers and I will interview and work with them.”

She explains that to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship one needs a number of things, namely, a great proposal, but also letters of support from your institution and two reference letters. “You also need a letter of support from a US institution stating that they will host you. Luckily I was already part of a project with a colleague from PennState University, Dr Laura Cruz, who works at the Schreyer Institute of Teaching Excellence.” Cruz agreed to host Gachago and helped with organising the invitation letter from her institution.

Gachago likes working with people across different institutions. She says that pushes her out of her comfort zone and expands her horizons.  However, she concedes that it’s not easy working without direct contacts, ‘but luckily online video conferencing tools and other online collaboration tools, such as Google Drive, have made it possible to work online across different contexts’.

She says: “This has kept us going throughout the COVID-19.”

Written by Aphiwe Boyce
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Linda Manashe is cautiously optimistic about the potential path of online multi-lingual glossaries at CPUT.

Based in the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology (CIET): Educational Technology Unit Manashe is a Courseware Developer who recently presented preliminary findings from a study she is working on at the International Conference on e-Learning (ICEL), hosted at Granger Bay Campus. The findings form the basis of the Masters thesis she should finish at the end of this year – Online multi-lingual glossaries in teaching and learning: A feasibility study.

Manashe looked at the accessibility of content and the use of the platform. While her thesis will examine three different glossaries her talk at ICEL concentrated on the experience of the 56 first year students studying Law of Contracts at the Unit for Applied Law, a service department in the Faculty of Business and Management Sciences.

It turns out most of the students felt the language used was understandable and they recommended using more African languages in higher education.

Students considered the freedom to interact with the platform anytime from anywhere to be a benefit and asked for a live chat section as well as a Facebook group to be added to the experience.

While most thought the glossary was useful and accessible, opinion was split about whether they thought the platform looked appealing.

“There is a high level of promise to using an online glossary for academic success,” was Manashe’s conclusion.

The glossary lists were initially compiled by the subject lecturers, starting with the 100 words/concepts they considered most problematic. These have to go through a rigorous verification process involving lecturers, students, industry specialists and external language experts.

“We sit in a verification workshop, we debate, create, coin and borrow words and make sure the verified definitions speak to the context of the academic concepts,” explained Manashe.

This ongoing project was launched in 2016 and already there are 12 glossaries online. There are 23 more glossaries in the pipeline, waiting to be verified.

Written by Theresa Smith
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Lecturers interested in developing Open Educational Resources at CPUT could soon have the benefit of a R10 000 grant. 

The Centre for Innovative Educational Technology (CIET) has sent out an open call for grant proposals to create innovative resources.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that allows their free use and repurposing by others.

These could be full courses, modules, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software or any tool, technique or material that could support access to knowledge.

Senior Lecturer in CIET Daniela Gachago says they successfully tried a similar project in 2016 when various lecturers developed an array of teaching materials. One lecturer created a self-study app for isiXhosa tutorials while a librarian created an information literacy module using various learning styles.

CIET later used these resources to develop their guides for online learning and assessment. She said while the resource could take any form, the overriding idea is that the material will be shared under a Creative Commons licence, “so it should be open to anybody to use.” Gachago says the project became especially pertinent during campus closures during protests.

“One of the things you have to understand about Open Education is that you have to put yourself out there. What you create is out in the world and that can be uncomfortable, that your voice is out there. “So we had conversations that were meant not only to reassure each other but also to peer review the quality of what we put out.

” She encouraged anyone who wanted to submit a proposal to “think open, think sharing, think generously” and to use openly available software to make their resources available to anyone.

*If you are interested in submitting a proposal (deadline June 15, 2018) email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or read the CIET OER blog for more information about the Open Education Project at CPUT.

Written by Theresa Smith
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