Telagogy: New theorisations about learning and teaching in higher education post-Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Teaching history invokes the motif of ancient feud with dispute focused on meanings of learning. Learning meanings deriving from traditional theories such as behaviourism need abandoning post-pandemic. Emerging theories, including Non-Affirmative Theory of Education (NATE) with a strong social justice motif, ought to undergird new learning. This would provide opportunities for remote learning to develop into a socially-just empowering learning experience that derives from rooted cosmopolitanism and AI systems (telagogy). Telagogy would assume an asynchronous and technology-as-essence framework in lieu of the COVID-19 remote learning synchronous and technology-as-utility framework that mimicked in-person contact sessions. In the latter framework, learning comes under students’ control who can access it anywhere and anytime plus students can curate their own personal curriculum. A qualitative Empowerment Evaluation method, with 15 advanced, multi-disciplinary undergraduates (N = 15) was used to investigate effects of one of the AI systems, chat-Generative Pre-Training Transformer (chat-GPT) on students’ learning. A Team Formation Process developed by Pitso (2020) was used to analyse data. Findings show that chat-GPT lessen the time of doing an assignment and help students to be creative suggesting that undergraduate studies ought to shift to productive thinking.