Duan van der Westhuizen

I teach, I research, and I supervise postgraduate students currently from all over the world (You can click the button above to read my articles).

My interests are about innovation in education. It is about learning to teach with, and learn with, technology. Some people call it eLearning or Blended Learning.

I am a born and bred teacher, who started my career in schools before becoming a university lecturer in 1997 at the former Rand Afrikaans University. I completed my doctorate in 1999. In the same year, I was relieved of lecturing duties by university management and tasked to lead the implementation of a Learning Management System across the institution. At the time, I chose WebCT as LMS (today BlackBoard).

I was subsequently appointed as a Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, and finally Professor in 2007. In 2007, I became the Head of Department for the Department of Mathematics, Science, Technology, until 2010.

I have a passion for teaching, and I like to think that I teach passionately.

Despite my passion for teaching with ICTs, I remain critical of its use in education, as I am of the opinion that it mostly perpetuates fundamentalist ‘teaching about’ practices. Teaching should be about ‘learning to be’, about 'becoming' and ‘should always be authentic and have real-life significance.

I also have a particular interest in research methodologies that are appropriate for researching Learning Technologies, and I am pre-disposed to Design-based Research methodologies.

I have supervised more than 50 Masters students and 15 Doctoral students successfully. Currently, I am leading the implementation of a fully online Masters in ICTs in Education, a programme that is massively popular, with boundary-changing outcomes!