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Significant interventions and even bolder plans are afoot at WSU in a bid to improve the university’s projects designed to enhance the university’s core business of teaching and learning, research and innovation as well as community engagement.
Friday 27 January saw WSU Vice-Chancellor Prof Rushiella Songca cut a stern and determined figure during her opening address at the Komani Campus as she outlined the blueprint of what the university will look like in the next two to three years and how she intends achieve the institution’s aspirations.
Most significant of those interventions included the identifying of key niche areas upon which the university can build its brand through targeted investment of resources in the faculties of engineering; health sciences; natural sciences and education.
“Towards the end of November last year we received money from DHET to invest in infrastructure and this year we will start building a state of the art faculty of engineering in Potsdam.
Regarding our health sciences faculty, there is a lot of great work going on in that space with a lot of knowledge being generated but no one knows about it because it’s not produced in academic literature. In this regard, we want to include a much-more stringent research component within the faculty to produce impactful research that can be published in the public domain and work to design that research aspect has begun,” said Prof Songca.
More good news was in store from the vice-chancellor as she announced that the university has finally started work in investigating and indeed doing the spadework in an effort to pursue an academic offering in the agricultural space.
Prof Songca said the university had identified potential partners, experts and collaborators to assist the university in conceptualizing and designing a BSc AgriTech programme that would see its first intake of students by 2025.
“The work towards this goal has to start now so that we can produce a body of work which we can submit to the Senate in their next sitting in July or August. It’s imperative that we work diligently because after Senate, it could take us another year to get the necessary approval from the Council on Higher Education,” she said.
Prof Songca also spoke, quite passionately, at length about the university’s responsibility and on-going efforts to support students’ academic project so they can pass in record time and avoid staying within the academic system longer than they should.
One of the key interventions regarding the aforementioned was the establishment of the Student Advancement Success and Retention Unit (SASRU) – a virtual unit conceptualized in late 2020 and formally introduced in the university in 2022.
“SASRU was created deliberately to give academic support to our students therefore we need to monitor its activities and to ensure that it does what it was intended to do. Such support is critical from first-year student experience onward so that we don’t have students struggling from the onset,” said Prof Songca.
Other academic support programmes the VC highlighted included the Student Tracking Unit; Student Writing & Academic Support programme; the tutor & PAL programmes; as well as the Uzalo programme designed for a specific focus on supporting students from first-year onwards.
The dignity and equity of students within the spaces they reside and learn is was an especially important part of the VC’s address as she spoke passionately about what the university has done to address this dual challenge.
She, quite rightfully, boasted about a few projects the university has recently completed, and a few others that will be completed and opened soon, and these included:
- Zamakulungisa Site IT Hub
- Teaching Malls at the Nelson Mandela Drive Site
- Clinical Skills Simulation Lab at the NMD Site
- Marine Biology and Pollution Lab at the NMD Site
- New residence at Butterworth Campus
- Lecture hall in Ibika Campus
By Thando Cezula
