11 September 2026
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Story Christelle du Toit
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Photo Kaleidoscope
UFS academics and colleagues engage during the 2026 Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, exploring how curriculum design and teaching practice can create more meaningful learning experiences for students.
For Prof Hester C. Klopper, the question facing university teachers is no longer simply whether they have covered the curriculum.
Opening the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Annual Learning and Teaching Conference 2026, the Vice-Chancellor and Principal asked academics to consider how modules can remain relevant in a changing world, and whether assessment is genuinely measuring what students are meant to learn.
“We often get nervous to say, oh, have we covered all the content?” she said. The challenge is that content delivery does not necessarily mean that learning has taken place.
The conference, held from 7 to 11 September under the theme Quality-Enhanced Learning and Teaching: Human-Centred Learning and Teaching for Societal Impact, brought that question into discussions about curriculum renewal, learner agency, authentic assessment, digital competence, and the conditions in which students learn.
For Prof Klopper, the shift is not about abandoning disciplinary knowledge. Universities still need depth, rigour, and intellectual seriousness. But students also need to engage actively with knowledge, make meaning from it, and use it. As information becomes increasingly available through technology, she argued, the important question is what students do with what they know.
Putting curriculum renewal into practice
The question of evidence was also part of the conversation. Prof Francois Strydom, Senior Director of UFS’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, is among those working to strengthen evidence-informed approaches to learning and teaching. Klopper noted that he regularly asks a simple question in discussions about teaching and learning: “Where’s the evidence?”
One example came from Dr Wouter de Wet of the Department of History on the Qwaqwa Campus. In his presentation, Curriculum Renewal as an Ongoing Process: Lessons from Redesigning a First-year History Module, he showed how changes to teaching and assessment can encourage students to move beyond recalling information.
Students working with Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, for example, are asked first to describe the sites and then to explain how they were linked to wider intercontinental trade routes. The task places the sites within a broader historical context and asks students to analyse rather than simply remember.
The assessment follows the same approach. Students practise similar activities in tutorials two or three times before completing the assessed version. They therefore encounter the type of thinking required in the assessment as part of their learning, rather than only when marks are at stake.
Curriculum renewal, in this sense, does not necessarily mean replacing everything that came before. It can mean looking closely at whether the different parts of a module are working together to produce the learning that was intended.
Dr Elzana Kempen approached a similar problem in a postgraduate module for health professionals developing into educator roles. The existing module contained professional-skills activities, reflection, skills development, and a portfolio, but the activities were experienced as separate tasks. Dr Kempen redesigned them into a connected learning journey in which students reflected on their experiences, engaged with theory, received feedback, and decided what to do next.
The reason for the redesign was particularly revealing. Dr Kempen said students had initially approached the activities as ‘tick boxes’ – something to complete and earn marks for, rather than an experience through which they could grow. The redesigned module gave them more opportunities to make meaning from what they were doing.
Students’ reflections showed increased self-awareness, clearer professional direction, and greater confidence in their educator roles. The process also changed Dr Kempen’s own approach to teaching. She moved from seeing herself primarily as a knowledge expert to creating opportunities for students to develop their own professional identities.
“I don’t think a curriculum can prescribe someone’s professional identity,” she said. “But I do think we can design the conditions in which the identity can develop.”
The learning experience beyond the classroom
For Prof Anthea Rhoda, UFS Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, the conference created something that can be difficult to find in the ordinary rhythm of university life: time to stop and think about teaching and learning.
Addressing delegates on the third day, she noted that academics move between teaching, research, supervision, assessment, meetings, and planning, often without enough time for ‘deep learning’ and ‘deep thinking’ about the work itself.
She asked what quality teaching and learning should mean in the UFS context, what it means to be a human-centred university in a rapidly changing world, and, most importantly, “What kind of learning experiences do our students need from us, so that they graduate but then can contribute meaningfully to society?”
That question takes the conversation beyond the module itself.
Prof Klopper put the human dimension plainly: “Behind the student number is a person.”
For UFS academics, curriculum renewal is therefore not only about updating content. It is about paying closer attention to how students learn, what they are asked to do, and whether their learning equips them to use knowledge with confidence and judgement beyond the classroom.