Addressing the challenges associated with LaTeX professional development in Ghanaian higher education: Mathematics students’ perspectives

Technology professional development (TPD) is crucial for educators, IT professionals, and other technology users to keep up with rapidly evolving technological landscapes. Pre-service teacher TPD programs aim to equip future educators with knowledge and skills needed to utilize innovation effectively in their instruction. During TPD initiatives, different challenges may arise causing inconvenience during the program. This study is therefore geared towards exploring the challenges students faced during a LaTeX professional development program in one of the universities in Ghana and to provide possible enablers for improving the training. 222 students were sampled for the quantitative data and 25 students were divided into 5 different focus groups for qualitative data. Quantitative data was gathered from an online survey questionnaire while the qualitative data was structured interview. Descriptive statistics was used for the quantitative aspect of the study and the inductive thematic analysis approach was used for the qualitative data. The results from the survey show that insufficient time, large class sizes, and inadequate technological tools were the main challenges students encountered during the LaTeX training. Participants recommended that LaTeX should be taught as a single course, more budget allocation to the computer lab, decrease the number of students in the lab as well as students’ evaluation of the LaTeX application software should be practical.