Teaching and Learning Review 2020
• In the November 2020 ITC examination, the University again took first position in South Africa and achieved a remarkable 97% pass rate for the January and June examinations combined. ‘UP’s consistency and success in achieving these results are attributed to the innovative teaching methods, excellent lecturers walking the extra mile, as well as the students’ talent and commitment,’ said Professor Loots. • Somona Kabemba, an MCom (Industrial and Organisational Psychology) student in the Department of Human Resource Management, earned the Emerging Psychologist of the Year Award, which is presented annually to a student or intern who is recognised for his or her academic excellence and has displayed extraordinary achievement as an emerging industrial and organisational psychologist in the preceding year. • The Department of Financial Management received well-deserved recognition from the Chartered Institute for Management Accountants (CIMA). They were awarded the CIMA Prize-Winner Excellence Award, which recognises university partners with top-performing CIMA students in case study examinations, as well as the CIMA Global Excellence Award, which recognises university partners that achieved the highest pass rates for CIMA examinations. • UP dominated the Ernst & Young 2020 global Young Tax Professional of the Year (YTPY) competition. With three students on the list, UP represented 60% of the 2020 top five of this competition. The competition is open to students from universities around the world and is aimed at identifying future tax leaders.
Sciences is committed and excited to maintain its position as a leader in teaching and learning.
Brown Bag Lunches Stepped up to Online The faculty annually presents approximately six face-to-face teaching and learning brown bag lunches to facilitate the development and maintenance of lecturers’ teaching proficiency on a continuous basis. In 2020, however, the lockdown caused by COVID-19 made the carefully planned face-to-face teaching development opportunities, bar the first workshop, seemingly impossible. However, the faculty stepped up to the plate and, with the assistance of the education consultant, Ms Elmien van Amerom, managed to transition professional learning to the online environment smoothly. Because of the sudden unavoidable switch to online teaching, the focus of the 2020 events was realigned with online teaching and its practical implementation. The 2020 academic year kicked off with the face-to-face EMS Teaching and Learning Workshop on 23 January 2020, which was attended by more than 150 staff members. During this workshop, lecturers were exposed to the value of contextualisation of learning content and student engagement, the latter illustrated by using virtual clickers with Turning Point as well as H5P.
sessions on assessment were presented. One focused on the PDF online assessment method, widely used in the faculty, where students write their tests at home by hand, and then scan and PDF their answer scripts and upload them on clickUP. A second was on the online marking tool used to mark these PDF tests and a third was on how to do an online perusal of test papers. Lastly, a session was held to illustrate the use of the Bulk Upload plug-in on Blackboard to distribute large numbers of marked assessments to students seamlessly. Two other articles in this section explain this more fully. In addition, two sessions were held pertaining to the faculty’s project to attain accreditation by the prestigious international Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). They specifically focused on upskilling staff on the assurance of learning and the use of rubrics for assessment purposes. The uptake of the online brown bag lunches
Brown bag lunches go virtual
• An honours student in investment management at UP who completed economics in his final year of undergraduate studies was crowned the winner of the undergraduate category of the annual 2020 Nedbank and Old Mutual Budget Speech Competition.
In view of the switch to online teaching, and since one of the themes for the year was student engagement, the first two Blackboard Collaborate online sessions presented dealt with the effective use of Blackboard Collaborate as well as discussion boards. As Blackboard is the main teaching platform in the online environment, another training session focused on how to use performance data from Blackboard to inform teaching.
After completing its first century on a high note, the Faculty of Economic and Management
Owing to the rise of integrity issues in the online environment, four Blackboard Collaborate
during 2020 was excellent. The large audiences were attributed, on the one hand, to the fact that lecturers had a need to upskill themselves in the online teaching environment and, on the other hand, to the convenience of tapping into such training sessions and having recordings of all sessions available for recapping or asynchronous watching at a later stage. Around 400 staff members attended these sessions (some obviously attended several times) during the year, and at one session a total of 120 lecturers attended. This was the largest single attendance in the history of the faculty’s brown bag teaching and learning lunches.
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