Student-generated content: an approach to harnessing the power of diversity in higher education

ABSTRACT

Internationally, classes in higher education institutions are becoming larger and more diverse. Support for ‘non-traditional’ students has often taken the form of additional remedial classes offered outside the main curriculum, which has met with limited success. Sociocultural theories of learning argue that the potential clash between the sociocultural context of disciplinary knowledge and the very different home contexts of many non-traditional students needs to be acknowledged. One way to achieve this is to use student-generated content, which allows teachers to bring student experiences and voices into the community of practice and acknowledges the importance of their prior experiences in knowledge production. Building on such sociocultural approaches to teaching and learning, this paper focuses on the use of student-generated podcasts as a means to harness the diversity of student experiences in a large (nearly 600 students) first-year Economics class at a South African University.

KEYWORDS:

• Student-generated content
• diversity
• podcasts
• sociocultural context

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to the staff of the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University, for their ongoing support and enthusiasm for comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The use of racial categorization in this article relies on the South African Department of Labour terminology of Black African, Indian (South Africans of Indian descent), ‘Coloured’ (people of mixed racial heritage) and white, with ‘black’ encompassing Black African, Indian and Coloured.

2 In all, 45 video tuts were received online, with another 12 being emailed or provided via flash drive. Students worked in groups of no bigger than 3. A maximum of 171 responses should have been received to this evaluation question, but 178 responses were received. The only explanation for this is that a few students may have misunderstood the question and responded as creators, even when it was they had not in fact submitted a podcast.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Teaching Development Grant from the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University.