Mellivora Educational (Pty) Ltd

Leigh and Xavier Middleton launched Mellivora Educational (Pty) Ltd (previously Middleton Educational) as a way to support fellow lecturers at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in producing quality content for their courses.

This initially took the form of using blended learning techniques, screencasts and taking full advantage of the respective institutions' Learner Management System (LMS) (e.g. Blackboard and Moodle).

During the fees-must-fall protests, it became clear that the future of tertiary education will hinge on a fine balancing wire between providing quality education, facing the challenges of our students and exploring new and exciting ways to provide our content and courses to our students.

Our desire to explore new ways to teach has been strengthened during the Covid-19 epidemic. During the lockdown, we explored different ways to provide mobile-orientated content to our students (in other words, being mindful of m-learning techniques).

One example of our use of m-learning techniques is through our Youtube Channel. Our instructional videos are between 5 - 10 mins long - which we consider to be a reasonable/optimal length. It allows the students to view the content, and if necessary to allow them to pause and re-watch the material. We also offer students a "lower-resolution" mobile-optimised version of our videos (<20 Mb). This version is hosted on the respective institution's Learner Management System.

Our Youtube channel can be visited at:

https://www.youtube.com/c/middletoneducational/featured