Andragogy and pedagogy in technical education

This paper explores how to deal with university students, with some being self-motivated/ self-directed and some being teacher-motivated/ teacher-guided. In this paper, ‘andragogy’ refers to the art and science to teach self-motivated and self-directed students. ‘Pedagogy’ refers to the art and science to teach teacher-motivated and teacher-guided students. This paper investigates how learning and teaching can happen effectively that requires teachers to use both the andragogy and pedagogy, particularly for dealing with the information technology students in a first-year first-term subject ‘Systems Analysis’ in two programs about ‘Bachelor of Information Technology’. The subject involves dissimilar students who needed minimal, averaged, or substantial help from the teachers, in order for each teaching member to adequately help the students to achieve their best possible performances. This research adopts a qualitative case study approach. It collected data obtained through observation, survey and documentation. The analysis results show that there are mixtures of both self-motivated and self-directed students, as well as teacher-motivated and teacher-guided students in the classrooms. It is recommended that a teaching approach using both andragogy and pedagogy is a realistic useful approach for any teaching members, whenever a classroom involves students as a mixture of both self-motivated/ self-directed and teacher-motivated/ teacher-guided students. This paper shows the preliminary study results and more future work will take place to enrich the study results.