The exponential development of digital technology in higher education (HE) has fundamentally transformed traditional teaching and learning worldwide, blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. The 4IR coupled with the outbreak of COVID-19 accelerated the process by which academics adopted digitally enabled pedagogies. As a way for ensuring that “no student is left behind”, remote multimodal teaching and learning (RMTL) was introduced by the South African government in 2020 and widely adopted by Higher Education institutions (HEIs) throughout the country. RMTL acknowledges that students represent different generations, personality types, and learning styles, thus university educators should seek to use multiple approaches including distance education and online technologies to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of students. In an interdisciplinary department such as Construction Economics and Management it was rather challenging to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach as various courses called for different approaches. Based on the nature, outcomes and assessments of individual courses, academics in the CEM department adopted what various scholars refer to as ‘flexible pedagogies’ (Thomas, 1995; Gordon, 2014; Dennis; Matheson and Tangeny, 2020) to ensure that “no student is left behind”. In this paper I draw on Bloom’s digital taxonomy to demonstrate how a flexible pedagogy afforded students with choice in the pace, place and mode of their learning over the past two years. Firstly, I provide some background to flexible pedagogy and its appropriacy in a digital age. Secondly, I demonstrate the application of this pedagogy in combination with Bloom’s digital taxonomy. In conclusion I explore some implications of a flexible pedagogy forHEIs to consider in preparing students for the digital future.

Author: Krystle Ontong

Published in: Ireland International Conference on Education (IICE-2023)

• Date of Conference: 24-26 October, 2023
• DOI: 10.20533/IICE.2023.10.0015
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-68-6
• Conference Location: Dún Laoghaire, Ireland