Vision
The vision of the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology is to be the leading support environment for the effective and innovative use of technology for learning and teaching, enabling the institution to be at the heart of technology education in Africa.
Mission
The Centre for Innovative Educational Technology will develop and maintain an efficient and sustainable academic support service to enable us to respond to the teaching, learning, research and scholarship needs of the institution, through innovation and support of educational technologies and systems, in a proactive manner.
The former Centre for eLearning merged with the Fundani Educational Technology Unit at the end of 2015, establishing the Centre for Innovative Educational Technology (CIET). The new Centre comprises a team of senior researchers, instructional designers, educational technology facilitators, administrators, and IT technicians. The primary aim of CIET is to support the academic project in the effective use of educational technology for learning and teaching. Further to this, the Centre regards its activities as central in the application of knowledge to address real-world problems, especially as experienced in a constrained higher education environment. Within the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, CIET’s goal is to research, develop and employ technology – informed by pedagogical principles – to make teaching and learning practice more effective.
CIET is the custodian of Blackboard, the institutional learner management system (LMS) at CPUT. The LMS provides an accessible, secure and stable environment for online teaching and learning activities, in line with the 2014 White Paper for Post-School Education and Training, as well as the 2014 Good Practice Guide for Distance Education published by the Council on Higher Education. The LMS is hosted in the cloud and can be accessed at any time and independent of location, using any device with an internet connection. CIET is also actively engaging in the provision of learning analytics, including the development of predictive analytics to identify students at risk with the aim to implement remedial interventions to improve throughput and success.
Both locally and internationally, CIET partakes in fundamental research activities, predominantly in the field of educational technology. This includes mentorship and supervision of postgraduate students, academic leadership (hosting of symposia, participation in organising committees, and membership of editorial boards), active fieldwork, as well as publication in respected peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. The Centre employs an NRF Rated Researcher and is an active member of several institutional, national and internationally sponsored research projects.
CIET also plays an active role within the South African Technology Network (SATN) in the identification of technologies used by all member institutions and the development of benchmarks for effective utilisation of technologies for teaching and learning, and to develop adoption strategies in line with international best practice on the early identification of students at risk.