Page 87 - UniZulu Annual Report 2020

The University has put in place measures to identify the needs of students to appropriately support students. This commitment also included catering to the needs of students with disabilities.
The current TLP straddles short-term and mid-term interventions but also projects into the long-term post- COVID-19 crisis phase. The University’s TLP sets to achieve the following key objectives:
• To ensure that staff can teach and maintain continuous communication with students using online platforms
• To establish the digital and online technology needs
of students and making decisions that are informed by research on how to optimally distribute learning opportunities to all students
• To ensure that necessary resources such as technology devices, print-ready and digital learning materials are available for use by academic staff and students and that these are distributed accordingly to facilitate multimodal teaching and learning
• To facilitate effective revision of some components of the curriculum content and maintaining a smooth alignment with exit level outcomes, the revised academic calendar and resources that are accessible to all students
• To equip academic staff with instructional design skills to develop learning materials guided by course outlines and programme curriculum for effective learning outside the traditional classroom-based teaching
• To equip students with necessary skills to learn through digital platforms in particular, as well as to learn remotely
• To empower and mobilise academics, tutors and mentors to use the University’s Moodle LMS to facilitate effective
online learning for all registered students
• To ensure that assessments tasks are developed and
competence assessment is conducted in the context of multimodal teaching and learning, without compromising quality and graduate attributes of students
• To ensure effective monitoring of student performance and learning experiences to measure the success of digital and online teaching and learning modes
The implementation of TLP was coordinated through the office of the DVC: Teaching and Learning, and the entire Executive Management Team. The University committed to the principle that all offices at UNIZULU were responsible for implementation.
Exceptions
Exceptions were made to identified groups to return to campus throughout the year in compliance with the statutory regulations. The first cohort of students who
returned to campus was 94 Nursing students from the Faculty of Science on 29 June 2020. These students needed to complete prescribed professional training and practical hours before they could qualify and graduate; they were identified as students-at-risk to complete the academic year 2020. Clinical teaching took place in the clinical skills laboratory until 10 July 2020. The Nursing students were placed in the clinical facilities on 13 July 2020. A request was further submitted to allow a selection of final-year and postgraduate students to return to campus after 15 July 2020 due to their need for specialised software to successfully complete their assignments and research. Master’s and Doctoral candidates requested to return to campus to have access to the Library and to progress with empirical analysis using software packages only available on campus, for example, SPSS, and STATA. BCom (MIS) students needed priority to return to campus under level 3 as they required access to computer labs and software not available to them remotely. In addition to specialised software such as Ms Visio 2016 (not part of the MS suite) and Eclipse (open internet-based but data-heavy), they had projects and a final exam comprising a 70% practical component. Under level 1, the University allowed a total of 908 students back on campus. Various sources were used to provide students with free information on the pandemic. The library created a portal on its webpage for all publishers that lifted access restrictions to COVID-19 information.
Writing Centre
The Writing Centre aims to empower students with writing skills.This is done by emphasising writing as a mode of learning where cognitive functions such as analysis and synthesis are developed through spoken and written language. The Writing Centre hosts events and workshops that offer guidance to student writers and supports writing in the disciplines by providing faculty development opportunities in planning, developing and implementing effective writing pedagogy. The Writing Centre at UNIZULU works with the students to: deepen students’ understanding of academic literacy and the writing process; equip students with linguistic competence and communication skills required for academic learning. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the writing concentrated on writing support for postgraduate students, mostly online and through emails. In addition, student tutors and Writing Centre assistants have been appointed to assist both staff and students. An allocation of 259 tutors was approved for 18 modules. Online tutor training was done on 4 June 2020 and was aimed to capacitate tutors with knowledge on the roles and responsibilities of tutorship.
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UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND ANNUAL REPORT 2020