Communities of practice in the National ICT Policy for Education: A case study of the Faculty of Education at the University of Namibia

The purpose of this evaluation study was to determine the extent to which the teacher educators in the Faculty of Education at the University of Namibia implemented the communities of practice as stipulated in the Namibian national ICT Policy for Education objectives. This study employed the quantitative cross-sectional method in the form of questionnaires. Based on a sample of 100 participants surveyed 73 respondent, which was a 73% response rate to the questionnaire. A number of methods were applied to capture aspects of community of practice. Amongst others were the Likert Scale, Pearson-Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, Eigenvalue: Factor Analysis, Eigenvalue: Cluster, and Kruskal-Wallis Test. The findings indicated that the respondents scored low, below 30% on the different components of communities of practice at the different campuses of the University of Namibia. The findings indicate that the participants have limited knowledge on how to share knowledge about the effective use of ICTs at the different University of Namibia campuses. The teacher educators at the University of Namibia need to learn better ways of content sharing areas, explore supportive tools, and create community repository areas where the participant’s activities and learning materials can be shared and stored.