Model for Online Teaching and Learning in Zimbabwe Higher Education

This research sought to create a model for online teaching and learning in Zimbabwe higher education, having realised the haphazard manner in which online teaching and learning was being conducted in the said institutions. This was done through determination of the requirements for this endeavour and then using such to design a model. Comprehensive review of related literature was conducted, which resulted in the creation of a conceptual framework. The research followed the pragmatism research philosophy, backed by a mixed method research choice in which questionnaires and interviews were used as research instruments. A case study research design was adopted, with a population of 22000 students and 2240 lecturers. These were sampled at 1% of students and 5% of lecturers. Cluster sampling was used to split the groups, while stratified sampling was used in each group. The major findings of this study were that both lecturers and students require laptops and smartphones as key gadgets for OTL, the internet was also identified as a key infrastructural requirement for OTL success, ICT technical skills and online pedagogical skills are two key skills required especially by lecturers for them to be effective on the online space, and the challenges for OTL were mainly lack of gadgets, slow internet, power challenges, and skills gap. Key recommendations were for universities to come up with schemes to assist lecturers and students to acquire gadgets, continuous ICT skills upgrading for lecturers, online pedagogical skills training and provision of mitigatory measures to handle challenges to online teaching and learning.