Understanding UWC students

The student body at the University of the Western Cape were very different from my own experience at Stellenbosch. The mainly black African and Coloured student body comes from poorer and previously disadvantaged backgrounds. Many of the students do have access to the internet, smartphones and laptops (or unreliable electricity supplies for these devices), but cannot afford the textbooks, and do not want to spend the amounts required to buy textbooks. This makes lecture notes and additional material provided more important.

During my first lecture, I conduct a short survey of students in an attempt to see what access they have with regards to the internet. Below is the example used before the Covid-19 pandemic. The main reason why I conduct these surveys is to check which internet tools will be most effective with the group. I use them to aid in my understanding of the students' situations at home as well. In the future, I would like to expand on this survey and include more questions on what their expectations of the courses are, home conditions and travel time, and what they expect of me. This can easily be done with Google Forms for immediate feedback as shown in the image below.

I did a similar questionnaire with my ECO335 students and found similar responses for access to the internet and technology. This suggests that in future I could use these technologies for in-class assessments and exercises in the form of Clickers and online assessments. Given that some students may not have access, there should be an alternative available as well. For example, I could take some hard copies of the prepared examples as well.

In this questionnaire, I further asked what did student's home language was to ensure that I make as much assistance available for second language speakers. However, most students were English and Afrikaans speakers and three students speak isiXhosa at home. I had to exchange students in the class as well - a Dutch and Rwandan student. The Dutch student did not have language issues but struggled with the economics (as it was not his undergraduate course) and as such, I connected him with a personal tutor to help with some of the work covered in earlier years. The Rwandan student struggled with the language since English is only her third language. She only came to speak to me at the end of the semester. It might be worthwhile to include questions on where the students come from to avoid such cases in the future.

The Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed this. With learning forced online in order to minimize cases, students were provided with laptops and data. This meant that students were able to complete courses online. Although it was not without challenges, including load shedding and limited data. In order the minimize the negative effects of these aspects, I made the material available in various formats like videos, scripts of the videos and PDFs of notes. This overcomes limited data issues or if students do not have access to certain programs. For example, in ECO739, I make videos to explain the prescribed material, as seen in this here, but also make the same video explanations available as PDF, as seen here. In order to further aid the students, I created videos on how to use certain tools on iKamva. Please see section \ref{sec:technology} for specific examples and videos.