Director of Learning and Teaching Services presents a paper at the HELTASA 2013 Conference

University, attended the HELTASA 2013 Conference in UNISA Pretoria South Africa – where she presented a paper titled “Lecturers’ Facilitation of Students’ Learning Through Students’ Participation; Not Just a Technique”.

The theme of the conference was Higher Education in a Shifting Landscape: emergence, fragmentation and convergence.

Mrs Omingo’s paper focuses on how lecturers’ in some private universities in Kenya, support and increase students’ success, satisfaction and throughput rates.

Below is an Abstract of the paper.

ABSTRACT

Evidence suggests that majority of students tend to adopt surface approaches while studying at university. And over time the students’ motivation level tends to decrease. Therefore the onus to ensure that students consistently adopt deep approaches is on lecturers.

The studies informing this paper, sought to analyze lecturers’ accounts on facilitation of students learning and to determine the enabler(s) in lecturers’ facilitation of students’ learning through students’ participation. The first study was exploratory targeting twenty lecturers in four private universities in Kenya who had adopted student-focused approach. The second study targeted fourteen lecturers who had just been trained on student focused approach. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and teaching observations.

The findings showed that lecturers play the roles of facilitator, communicator and role model when facilitating students’ learning. Dispositions such as values, emotions and attitude acted as enablers in the lecturers becoming what they are to facilitate students’ learning. In conclusion, lecturers need to make their educational values explicit to effectively facilitate students’ learning though the values are bound to change over time as they are influenced by socio-cultural circumstances.