Approaches to ICT-enhanced teaching in technical and vocational education: a phenomenographic perspective

This paper presents the results of a study undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective, which examines teachers' approaches to information communication technology (ICT)-enhanced teaching in vocational tertiary education. Twenty-three teachers from three Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews about their ways of experiencing the use of ICT in various vocational courses. The findings revealed two strategies with five main orientations to ICT-enhanced teaching distributed along a continuum from teacher-focused approaches: comprising information-oriented, feedback-oriented and practice-oriented to student-focused approaches: consisting of activity-oriented and industry-oriented teaching. The identified strategies and orientations extend the frameworks of teachers' approaches to ICT-enhanced teaching revealed in the previous phenomenographic studies in tertiary education. The paper discusses theoretical and practical implications of these findings for TAFE sector and tertiary education in general.