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The WSU office of the Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic Affairs and Research, has embarked on a university wide drive to build capacity amongst academic staff, focussing mainly on qualification and programme registration, re-registration, and review.
This comes at an opportune time for the university as some of its programme offerings are soon to reach the end of their accreditation period.
Through capacity building workshops facilitated by a representative from the Council on Higher Education (CHE), staff are trained on the regulatory processes pertaining to the accreditation, registration, re-registration and funding of programmes and qualifications.
Moreover, emphasis is also placed on how to align qualifications to the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (HEQSF), as well as conduct a review of qualifications and programmes, and implement the required improvements.
Acting DVC-AAR, Professor Mashudu Davhana-Maselesele said: “As we know, our academics are specialists in their fields, but they are not trained in the area of teaching and learning curriculum development and design. So, we want to develop that capacity and ensure that going further they will be able to review their programmes and also ensure that they update what they are doing and keep records of what they do.”
Davhana-Maselesele also stipulated that staff would be empowered to play an active role in the university’s programme accreditation as they are gaining the know-how on things like the completion of PQM documents, which go to the Department of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, and other bodies like SAQA and CHE.
As a large percentage of WSU’s current and prospective student pool hails from the most remote parts of the Eastern Cape, the institution finds it crucial that its programme offerings speak to those particular students.
Part of these capacity building workshops is concerned with finding the best possible practices to ensure that the content and materials employed in teaching and learning resonate with the average WSU student.
Not only will this assist students to grasp new concepts better, but it is also a step in the right direction in pursuing the institution’s vision of “An impactful, technology-infused African university.”
“As a university we are in pursuit of excellence, and we just want to excel in whatever we do. Now is actually the right time because we are aligning everything to our new vision and mission. We also need to look at the issue of decolonizing our education so that we also bring in the African perspective into our own context,” said Davhana-Maselesele.
By Yanga Ziwele
