Introducing blended e-learning course design: A pre-implementation assessment of students’ basic ICT skills

In the face of diminishing education budgets in higher education, blended learning has been found to be a viable and effective approach to deliver high-quality, up-to-date, on-demand solutions to developing cross-curricular skills of undergraduates. However, research has also shown that blended learning solutions do not often live up to the potential of the approach or fail to produce the intended results because the students are not always equipped to handle the technical, psychological and organisational challenges of blended learning approaches. This project surveyed seventy-five first year Information Technology Education students of the University of Education, who completed an adapted version of Programme for International Students Assessment questionnaire during a routine orientation before the commencement of academic work for the 2011/2012 academic year. The exercise was to assess the students’ e-readiness for an implementation of a blend-ed course design.