Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for Teaching in the Digital Age

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many traditional contact higher education institutions, such as the institution where the study was based, transitioned abruptly to remote online learning. Students in the School of Education at the institution who are predominantly from the lower end of the socioeconomic digital divide in South Africa had no choice but to navigate digital technologies to further their education. The extent to which their digital learning experience fostered the requisite TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) and other cross-functional skills needed for the 4IR classrooms remained uncertain. Framed by the TPACK Model, this paper employed a mixed-method approach to understand students' online learning experiences and how their digital learning experiences prepared them for their future teaching practices. Data generated from questionnaires randomly distributed to undergraduate students, followed by a focus group interview with twelve purposively sampled students across the five undergraduate clusters of the school, was used to address the research objective. The findings revealed that it is unlikely that their virtual learning experience could have prepared them for teaching in the digital age. Insights from this paper will benefit academics in their online pedagogical engagements and curriculum design while informing policy directions at the institutional level. Keywords: digital learning, pre-service teachers, 4IR classroom, TPACK, students' experiences