Students’ Perception of Innovative Pedagogy in Facilitating Learning

Abstract

The third result area of the Sustainable Business and Employability through HEI's Innovative Pedagogy (SUSIE) focuses on “enhanced relevance and pedagogical capacity by increasing active (e) pedagogy competence of teachers.” This was intended to be achieved through various capacity building sessions to instructors in all three partner institutions, namely: Mwenge Catholic University (MWECAU), Moshi Corporative University (MOCU) and the former Tumaini University Dar es Salaam College (TUDARCo), now Dar es Salaam Tumaini University (DarTU). The main focus of this paper is on the perception of students on innovative pedagogy in facilitating learning at DarTU. The study however looks back on training that was provided to instructors and their contents and the methods instructors used in implementing these innovative pedagogical skills so as to get a holistic picture. A desktop review was conducted to collect necessary information on the trainings, its content and the participants who partook in the training. A questionnaire was distributed to 273 students in order to get an understanding on their perception of how these innovative pedagogical skills played a role in their understanding of the respective lessons. SPSS was used to analyse the data and findings reveal that innovative pedagogical skills not only play a significant role in enabling students to learn, it also increased class attendance, and improved grades of students in their respective classes. The study concludes by recommending institutions of higher learning to employ innovative pedagogy in teaching and to improve infrastructure to facilitate learning.