Latest updates – Thursday, 30-May-2013 15:01

TIES THAT BIND: Delegates from WSU and UCM at the East London Health Resource Centre during the two-day engagement session.

 

WSU LENDS A HELPING HAND TO MOZAMBICAN UNIVERSITY

A Mozambican university delegation believes Walter Sisulu University (WSU) expertise in policy development will help it advance their University’s teaching and learning quality.

The 10-member team from Universidade Catholica Mozambique (UCM) have collaborated with WSU’s Centre for Learning and Teaching Development (CLTD) and the Centre for Community and International Partnerships in order to help grow UCM’s institutional capacity in quality assurance, research development and teaching and learning.

“UCM is benchmarking our quality management systems and processes and specifically teaching and learning,” said CLTD director Valindawo Dwayi.

WSU underwent a similar programme from 2007 to 2012 when the university implemented the Netherlands Programme for the Institutional Strengthening of Post-Secondary Education and Training Capacity.

This latest NUFFIC project is a continuation of the Netherlands Initiative for Capacity development in Higher Education (NICHE).

The Mozambican University is the main beneficiary of the project which commenced in October 2012 and will run until September 2016.

WSU, together with Tshwane University of Technology are the South African implementation agencies, and work with Netherland’s Rijks Groningen Universiteit and Erasmus University Rotterdam.

UCM Director for Quality Assurance Craft Chadambuka said he believed the engagements will prove very fruitful because WSU and UCM share a lot of similarities.

“We believe we will see exactly what WSU is doing in terms of quality assurance, how it can assist us in developing our own instruments and how these can be made relevant and useful in our efforts to produce good results for our institution,” he said.

Chadambuka said even though the deliberations are an important point of departure with regards to the project – implementation of the inputs by the two universities would be the true measure of the success of the deliberations.

Issues covered in the engagement include, amongst others, student profiling, teacher evaluation, evaluation assessment practices, employer surveys and their implications for programme development.