Abstract
M.Ed.
The 21st century society requires of everyone to be adaptable in changing environments. Teachers, even more so, pre-service teachers need skills to assist them in the 21st century society. One of the most important skills for coping with the problems and opportunities in society is lifelong learning. If individuals can learn new skills and knowledge within the ever-changing society, individuals will be adaptable to new situations as they arise.
The Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg strives to be at the forefront of this teacher education. In 2014, two lecturers set out to achieve this aim. The lecturers redesigned a module called Professional Studies 3A, a compulsory module in the degree studies of every third-year education student at the University of Johannesburg. The new module content included a focus on using professional and personal networks, as well as other online tools and services. The aim was to help students to acquire the necessary skills needed to be lifelong learners, course designers, and critical and creative thinkers.
The pre-service teachers used MOOCs to cultivate these lifelong learning skills. The assignments and other evidence created through the module were used as documents and digital artefacts in the data analysis for this inquiry. These artefacts were analysed case by case for the open coding part of the Grounded Theory Analysis. A combined case with six participants’ data was described in the axial coding phase of the analysis.
Using Grounded Theory Analysis to code the documents and Actor-Network Theory to provide a network view of human and non-human actors and the relationships between them, the research study provides an in-depth understanding and evaluation of the experiences of pre-service teachers while using MOOCs to cultivate their lifelong learning traits and skills. Using Actor-Network Theory it was found that there are specific relationships between the content, activities, the barriers they provide, the skills needed and cultivated, as well as the previous knowledge and skills that pre-service teachers have. Connected tools and services seem to enhance these relationships. These relationships are important aspects in the cultivation of lifelong learning. This finding is significant in that connected tools and services can be used...