Page 14 - DUT Annual Report 2024

students and staff. This response serves as evidence of our practice of monitoring, evaluation and a learning framework we adopted several years ago to give effect to ENVISION2030.
Systems and Processes
Systems and Processes is the second of our ‘enabling and effecting’ Perspectives. We have repeatedly been emphasising that systems and processes are not only the heartbeat of our university, they also serve as the catalyst for institutional cohesiveness, in that they facilitate order and cohesion for a university to function. While our people may represent the engine of a car, our systems and processes can be equated to spark plugs – crucial components in the ignition process, without which an engine cannot run. Thus, this Perspective is about the University’s ignition process: it ignites our strategy cylinders to ensure that we become a University that transforms economies and societies.
This Perspective comprises three SOs, namely Innovative Curricular and Research, Digital Environment and the State-of-the-art Infrastructure. There are numerous other systems we have put in place which cut across the entire Strategy.
Towards the end of 2023 several proposals emerged in the realms of teaching and learning and research and innovation which sought to provide the right direction in pursuit of our ENVISION2030-aligned Philosophy
of Education (Phi-Ed) statement: “Our creativity and innovation shapes adaptive graduates who transform society”. While this statement was only adopted by Senate in 2023, its origins date back to 2016, when the University planted a seed to birth new pathways to move us away from training for workplace. We acknowledge that the curriculum renewal exercise we embarked on in 2019 might have been largely for compliance; genuine curriculum transformation compelled us to question the underlying conceptual, philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of our teaching and learning approaches.
In order to move a step further from our Phi-Ed statement and its interpretive guide, our Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) put together a Green Paper which had been discussed by the Academic Executive Management (AEM) and our Implementation Support Practitioners (ISPs). The purpose is to mainstream this Phi- Ed. Several modules/programmes we offer are beginning to incorporate Design Thinking (DT) and Problem-Based Learning, which are integral parts of DUT’s Phi-Ed. faculty- based, University- and internationally-funded initiatives in this regard continue to take us farther in our curriculum transformation. We are also witnessing increased interactions and collaborations with industry for purposes of ensuring both the relevance and impact of our curricula and research.
For the period under review we finalised the policy on establishing research centres and institutes, and
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DUT ANNUAL REPORT 2024