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06 August 2018 Photo Sonia Small
Karen Lazenby WomenofKovsies
Dr Karen Lazenby strives for a stronger, rule-based, and consistent governance structure.
A transformed University of the Free State (UFS) will be one that promotes social justice in everything it does, a university where its diverse people feel a sense of common purpose and engagement. The UFS is developing this through its Integrated Transformation Plan (ITP) introduced in January 2017. 

“The majority of the current systems and processes in student administration at the university are still manual. This lack of automation leads to inconsistencies and service failures,” says Dr Karen Lazenby. As Registrar for Systems and Administration, Dr Lazenby is responsible for ensuring a smooth and efficient student lifecycle across all three campuses. 

With the ITP, the Governance: Systems and Administration work stream strives to have a stronger, rule-based, and consistent governance structure with a single line of accountability in student administration across all faculties and relevant support departments on the three campuses. By ensuring this ease of use and access there will be an integrated student experience and greater empowerment of students.

“Our focus is on automation and self-services for students (such as the time-table, requests for additional and ad hoc exams and appeals), to ensure transparency and accessibility of rules and policies, decisions relating to admission, progression rules, awarding of qualifications and graduation and faculty and general rules,” Dr Lazenby said.  It will also entail the optimisation of PeopleSoftCampus (the Enterprise Resource Planning system).

“Through this automation, I would also like to get the university’s student administration to such a level that academic staff can focus their energy on teaching and research and student administration staff can focus more on quality assurance,” said Dr Lazenby.

News Archive

Latest information technology employed to make learning in Disaster Management easy
2014-10-20



Prof Dusan Sakulski
Photo: Leonie Bolleurs
Live, colourful, interactive, real-time-calculated. This is how Prof Dusan Sakulski, researcher and lecturer from the UFS’s Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa (DiMTEC), describes his e-learning platform implemented in this department.

Rather than producing research that gathers dust somewhere in a cabinet, Prof Sakulski believes that research should be used to make life easier, not only for society, but also for his students.
 
This educational civil engineer, who is responsible for information technology implementation in disaster risk management, developed through his research several programs to optimise the three contact sessions DiMTEC students have to attend each year.
 
One of the initiatives implemented by Prof Sakulski and his daughter Teodora, was the recording, editing and compiling of theoretical lessons and making it available to students online. “Students then don’t have the excuse of missing a class. Furthermore, it allows them to rather focus on group work during contact sessions and to discuss problems they encountered with the work,” he says.
 
Students also have access to an early-warning system portal for the prediction of hazards, including droughts, floods, rain and temperature. In the disaster-risk environment, this program is very useful, not only for students, but also for practitioners working with this kind of data on a daily basis. The operational and educational application works in real time – with the click of a mouse students and practitioners have access to information on current weather conditions. Indicators for possible natural disasters are also built into this program. Truly a useful application when you are working in the field of disaster risk management.

Difficult and technical data are presented live, with information that is colourful, interactive, real-time-calculated and audible, thanks to embedded mathematical language. In this way, students can learn, memorise and understand their work better.


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