Hybrid integration of ICT in higher education: A case of UTAMU

While there is general understanding about the paradigm shift in the higher education sector, students’ demands, teacher instruction and technology changes, higher educational institutions are increasingly facing challenges of having to develop better strategies on how to train the digital students of this era. This is partly attributed to the failure to the rapidly changing roles and scope of the activities they are supposed to do in order to better facilitate the current digital natives. Today, it is easier for students to interact with so many technologies that may be known or unknown to their tutors. They interact with these technologies on a daily basis and to some students these have become part of them. It is therefore, pertinent for tutors of today to realize the need to change their forms of teaching and learning. Uganda Technology and Management University (UTAMU), in anticipation to improve on its delivery of teaching and learning developed a hybrid form of integration of ICT in their educational activities. This paper elaborates on the UTAMU Hybrid E-Learning Model that brings together three stakeholders (Digital students, teachers and family). The three stakeholders interact with all sorts of content and tools through the UTAMU E-Learning Content Space. Within the content space, a number of technological tools are adopted to help in the easy access of the information, undertake collaboration and secure the entire learning space. This content space was linked with numerous content repositories of resources that can be accessed by the stakeholders ubiquitously. An example of the content space could be a fully integrated E-learning System such as Moodle. Such repositories include the UTAMU E-Library, UTAMU Content Repository, Open Resource Repositories and so on. All the repositories are directly linked through and integrated layer which links them to the available quality standards, content developers, collaborative partners and community engagements. We envisage that when institutions of higher learning provide such a digital working space for students and teachers, the teaching and learning experience will be great. Students will easily integrate the technologies they need to do their studies, tutors will be able to undertake effective training through the well-known technologies and lastly the family (parents and relatives) will be able to participate in the teaching and learning through the informal training. Tapping into free resources such as the massively open online courses (MOOCS), open e-books, free videos and so on can easily improve how tutors undertake teaching and learning. Students being able to use what they know better like Google apps, Facebook and other social media applications that are fully integrated in the UTAMU Hybrid ELearning Model will highly improve their knowledge acquisition. It is therefore very important for any higher institution of this era to take seriously the type of stakeholders they have and how they need to provide for them in terms of achieving their educational objectives.