The Learning Technologies team develops and supports campus-wide educational technology applications, and assists Faculties to develop digital literacy skills. Educational support involves understanding the teaching and learning requirements of staff and students on an on-going basis. Educational technology involves selecting and implementing the appropriate software platforms and solutions to support these needs.The team focuses on building reusable tools that can be used by multiple courses and users (such as online learning environments).
There are a range of learning platforms and tools that the team are involved in, particularly the management and support of:
- Vula - UCT's online collaboration and learning environment used to support courses as well as other UCT-related groups and communities. Vula is jointly developed with other universities worldwide as part of the Sakai Project.
- Lecture recording - to support student learning through the automatic recording and publishing of lectures to Vula course sites for participating courses. The recording and distribution of the lectures is built through the open-source community, Opencast.
- Adobe Connect - a synchronous virtual meeting platform which supports audio and video conferencing, through the use of slide presentations, desktop sharing, whiteboard and chat, amongst others.
- Turnitin - assists with the prevention of plagiarism and encourages students to enhance their academic writing skills
Other special projects that support digital literacy include the previous laptop project, current personal mobile device project and the Commonwealth Digital Education Leadership Training in Action (C-DELTA) project.
