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31 July 2020
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Story Lacea Loader
As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the 3rd UFS Thought-Leader Series in collaboration with Vrye Weekblad as part of the Vrystaat Literature Festival’s online initiative, VrySpraak-digitaal.
This year, higher-education institutions
globally are placed in the challenging context of COVID-19. Aware and grounded in the reality that the world will not return to the normality of pre-COVID-19, our responsibility as scholars still remains to contribute to public discourse and to offer
innovative solutions that will impact the lives of people nationally and globally in order to help them understand and adapt to a new world order.
Against this background and context, this year’s debates focus on ‘Post-COVID-19, Post-Crisis’,
with Health and Modelling, Politics, Economy, and Predictions for 2021 as the sub-themes. Placed in a COVID-19 context, and in lieu of the Vrystaat Arts Festival,
the series will be presented virtually in the form of one webinar per month during the period August 2020 to November 2020.
Date: 13 August 2020
Topic: Health
and Modelling
Time: 11:30-13:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za
Facilitator:
Max du Preez
Editor: Vrye Weekblad
Biography
Introduction and welcome:
Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS
Panellists:
Prof Salim Abdool Karim
Director: Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
Chair: South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19
Biography
Prof Glenda Gray
President and CEO: South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)
Biography
Prof Felicity Burt
NRF-DST South African Research Chair in vector-borne and zoonotic pathogens research
Biography
Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching goes to trailblazer Dr Aliza le Roux
2013-11-15
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Dr Aliza le Roux
Photo: Supplied
15 November 2013 |
Dr Aliza le Roux, Subject Head in the Department of Zoology and Entomology at the UFS Qwaqwa Campus, is this year’s winner of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
It came as no surprise. Dr le Roux has already been piling up numerous awards as a result of her outstanding work as an academic who is also an NRF-rated researcher.
In 2012, she joined the Teaching and Learning Champions group, which inspired her to take a more scholarly, research-focused approach to her teaching. Dr Le Roux has had huge successes in her teaching at the Qwaqwa Campus, propelling student pass rates from less than 50% to more than 90% in one course. As part of her approach, she makes use of interventions such as pre-class quizzes on Blackboard.
She is also doing Action Research on the teaching method known as ‘flipping’ the classroom, a process that essentially reversed traditional teaching practice. Dr le Roux is also looking into the impact of introducing Zotero (a free user-friendly online tool for research purposes) on the Qwaqwa Campus.
Her primary research outside of the classroom focuses on the evolution of wild mammals’ cognitive abilities. Dr le Roux and her students are starting fieldwork in November this year, investigating how paternal care impacts bat-eared foxes’ physical and cognitive development.