Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items

Passionate Entrepreneurs win Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards

20 November 2020 | Story Charlene Stanley

Two lecturers in Business Management from the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences walked away with the 2019/2020 UFS Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards in the category Innovation in Student Engagement and Learning.

Dr Ekaete Benedict and Mrs Risna Opperman are also both real-life entrepreneurs who own businesses in and around Bloemfontein, using their practical experience from the business world to supplement the theoretical knowledge they impart to their students.

Success recipe

Lecturing the flagship entrepreneurship module in the Department of Business Management, the two lecturers use the graduate attributes theory as a starting point, which states that students should learn and develop certain skills, abilities, knowledge, and attitudes during their studies at university.

They then integrate and design their module outcomes, academic activities, and assessments to align with these attributes, ensuring that their students develop the skills that will help them to be better prepared for the work environment and self-employment.

Ekaete Benedict_web
Dr Ekaete Benedict. Photo:Supplied

To enhance learning and engagement, they employ blended learning techniques in the form of face-to-face classes supplemented with online activities via Blackboard.

They also effectively implement experiential learning, inviting real-life entrepreneurs and officials from various small-business development agencies as guest lecturers to communicate and interact with students.

Some of the lessons these industry experts have shared with students are:

How to protect your business ideas; How to access government funding; How to start your business; and How to market your business.

Aims of Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards

The Excellence in Teaching and Learning awards, hosted by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL), recognise academics for their innovative learning and teaching practices within different disciplines, as well as the advancement of the scholarship of teaching at the institution.Among its aims are to share best practices, innovative ideas, and research findings in learning and teaching.

Risna Opperman. Photo:Supplied

Value of Entrepreneurship

Both winners are passionately advocating the critical need for entrepreneurship education and training in the South African context.

“In the light of South Africa’s high unemployment rate (over 30%), plus the fact that we have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world (58.2%), there is a big demand for meaningful engagement of young people in productive activities – hence the need for entrepreneurship,” says Benedict.

“As entrepreneurship lecturers, our focus is not just on graduating future employees for the workforce, but to create and develop future employers who can contribute to the economic development of the country,” emphasises Opperman.

News Archive

IRSJ marks five years of championing social justice

2016-08-12

Description: IRSJ 5 year Tags: IRSJ 5 year

Members of the Advisory Board of the IRSJ,
Prof Michalinos Zembylas (Open University
of Cyprus), Prof Shirley Anne Tate (Leeds
University, England), and Prof Relebohile
Moletsane (University of KwaZulu-Natal),
listen to a speaker on the programme.
Photo: Lihlumelo Toyana

The Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice (IRSJ) marked its fifth anniversary with a function on 27 July 2016 in the Reitz Hall of the Centenary Complex on the Bloemfontein Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS). Earlier that day, the Advisory Board of the IRSJ, chaired by Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS, hosted their annual meeting.

A new book was also launched, co-authored by JC van der Merwe, Deputy-Director at the IRSJ and Dionne van Reenen, researcher and PhD candidate at the IRSJ. It is entitled Transformation and Legitimation in Post-apartheid Universities: Reading Discourses from ‘Reitz’. The function featured not only reflections on the IRSJ, but a four-member panel discussion of the book and higher education in 2016.

The IRSJ came into being officially at the UFS in January 2011. Prof André Keet, Director of the IRSJ, said: “With a flexibility and trust not easily found in the higher education sector, the university management gave us the latitude and support to fashion an outfit that responds to social life within and outside the borders of the university, locally and globally.”

The IRSJ has not hesitated to be bold and
courageous in reforming ... traditional policies."

Prof Jansen went on to mention three things he finds appealing about the IRSJ: “Thanks to Prof Keet and his team’s vision and understanding of how important it is for students to have a space in which they can learn how to be, learn how to think, and learn how to contribute, the IRSJ has become a place where students can learn about things that they might not learn in the classroom. Second, it created, for the first time, a space where members of the LGBTIQ community could gather in one place. And third, it speaks to the intellectual life of the university, as evidenced by the research and publications produced over the past few years.”

Prof Jansen added: “The IRSJ will only be successful to the extent that we have safe spaces, courageous spaces, in which not only black students talk to themselves, but where black and white students talk together about their difficulties. If you’re entangled, you can’t get out of [that] unless you speak to the other person.”

Prof Michalinos Zembylas of the Open University of Cyprus and member of the Advisory Board, said of the IRSJ: “The works produced by the institute in this short time have been valuable to this community and beyond, because they recognise the complexities of education, ... while pushing the boundaries of how to translate theoretical discussions into practical, everyday conditions. ... For example, the IRSJ has not hesitated to be bold and courageous in reforming some traditional policies in this university—remnants of an ambivalent past that reproduced inequality and disadvantage.

In reflecting on how the IRSJ came into being during her opening remarks, Dr Lis Lange, Vice-Rector: Academic at the UFS, said that it has always been “dedicated to transformation.” She added that it “gathered the energy and creativity of some of our most promising student leaders.” She concluded: “For me, the greatest success of the Institute, besides publications and local and international networks, is the fact that something that started in the margins is being asked today to come closer to the centre, to play a larger role in the structural transformation of the university.”

Back

Economic and Management Sciences

Education

Health Sciences

The Humanities

Law

Natural and Agricultural Sciences

Theology and Religion

Open Distance Learning

Business School

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept