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Enhancing and developing academic leadership through capacity building

17 August 2022 | Story Edzani Nephalela and Coreen Steenkamp | Photo Francois van Vuuren

Educational leaders serve a significant administrative, management, and leadership function in higher education. A departmental chair’s role differs fundamentally from other leadership contexts, based on the momentous transition from being an academic by profession to providing leadership at departmental level.

The Academic Leadership Programme (APL) was launched by the University of the Free State (UFS) Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to equip academics for various managerial positions. Faculty deans propose candidates for this programme; the second cohort has been chosen as the first is nearing completion.

The first workshop commenced with an engagement with the Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, Prof Francis Petersen, and the Vice-Rector: Academic, Dr Engela van Staden, who both shared strategic academic leadership perspectives during the orientation and welcoming of the APL.

Such reflections highlighted the expectations of being an educator, the complexity, and the critical role of departmental chairs within higher education institutions. Academic leaders are thus expected to establish firm leadership within their departments, facilitate intellectual development, manage administrative duties, and strive toward resilient learning and teaching environments.

“The position of departmental chairs remains critical for any higher education institution, as they provide leadership in advancing the discipline, teaching students, producing quality graduates, and serving the professional community,” said Prof Francois Strydom, Senior Director: Centre for Teaching and Learning.

Research confirms that most academics succeed in these roles without formal leadership training, yet the expectation of developing or having certain leadership qualities or management competencies must fulfil the various functions of such a position.

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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