The Digital and Online Education Policy (DOEP) guides blended learning at UCT. This sets the foundation for teaching and learning that intentionally blends in-person and online engagement to enhance student learning, foster academic belonging, and enable diverse learning pathways.
Modes of Provision
The policy outlines UCT’s principles and practices for digital education. The old dichotomies of ‘online’ or ‘contact’ modes of learning no longer adequately capture the contemporary reality of digitally enabled educational provision across a continuum.
- Fully online – students and teachers interacting remotely.
- Hyflex – one learning event with participants in-person and online simultaneously.
- Contact or in-person – students and teachers together in the same physical space.
Blended learning refers to how educators have chosen to combine different modes of teaching and learning within an overall frame of digitally enabled education.
Blended learning means designing learning experiences that include considerations of the discipline, context, educational purposes, values and pedagogies, alongside the most effective integration of technology.
Principles and Practices
Promoting UCT’s identify as a residential institution
- Embracing the continuum of educational provision across in person, blended and fully online modalities, where appropriate to students’ needs.
- Providing blended learning at undergraduate level, where Individual undergraduate courses can be taught in blended, hyflex or even fully online modes, as long as the full programme is not offered fully online.
- Developing blended and fully online learning for Postgraduate qualifications to better meet workplace, industry and professional needs.
Providing an equitable student experience
- Giving students support and opportunities to learn and use the latest technologies and develop knowledge and digital literacies through innovative curricula.
- Adopting inclusive approaches including accessibility best practice for digital materials and multilingualism to cater for a wide range of student needs, including those with disabilities.
- Foregrounding human mediation and relationships of care, including active learning as well as the ethical and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence (see UCT AI Framework).
- Facilitating opportunities for students to contribute their knowledge, co-create and learn from each other through teaching that encourages peer interaction and supports self-directed learning.
Developing an optimal teaching environment for staff
- Providing appropriate digital learning infrastructure, administrative ecosystem and student support services.
- Promoting the adoption of relevant pedagogies and learning tools for different disciplines.
- Provisioning appropriately resourced teaching teams which include TAs, tutors, learning designers and learning technologists.
- Supporting staff to adopt flexible ways of teaching using digital technologies to increase student engagement and provide continuity during disruptions.
Resources for creating a blended learning experience
- Enabling Accessible Blended Learning for Equity Framework (ENABLE).
- Humanising your blended classroom.
- Flipping the classroom (Resources).
- UCT examples.
