Latest News Archive
Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
13 August 2024
|
Story Anthony Mthembu
|
Photo Sibahle Dayimani and Amandla Kulu
Prof Peter Roseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium; and Prof Nicolene Barkhuizen, Director of the UFS Business School.
The Business School at the University of the Free State (UFS) hosted Prof Peter Rosseel, Managing Director of Management Consulting and Research – a spin-off of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium – for a guest lecture during his visit to the UFS Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS).
The guest lecture took place on 19 July 2024 in the Business School Auditorium and was attended by academics from the UFS.
Reflecting on the lecture
The lecture presented by Prof Rosseel focused on how combining strategy, strategy implementation, culture transformation, leadership, and learning successfully leads to sustainable growth, creates engagement, and delivers tangible results. Throughout the lecture, Prof Rosseel spoke about how experts tend to make bad leaders and therefore stop change from happening within an organisation. In fact, he highlighted that, “Experts stop change from happening within the workplace because experts, by definition, look through the eyes of their expertise, but you cannot reduce the world to different forms of expertise, as it is holistic.” As such, he argued that to change an organisation, one must see things from the point of view of others.
Furthermore, Prof Rosseel delved deeper into the hierarchical operating model within organisations. He indicated that the above model should be one community within organisations; however, unfortunately it is not. This is because organisations are made up of several departments such as finance and human resources. As such, he regards these departments to be silos that could prove to be detrimental to organisations, as each silo can create its own culture as opposed to an organisational culture. These are some of the points he discussed throughout the lecture.
After the lecture concluded, the audience had the opportunity to engage with Prof Rosseel on his viewpoints. In fact, Lyle Markham, Academic Head of Department and Lecturer in Industrial Psychology at the UFS, was one of the audience members and described the lecture as insightful.
UFS School of Nursing opens new frontiers at 40
2009-11-16
 |
The opening of the virtual facility of the School of Nursing at the University of the Free State (UFS) and a gala dinner to celebrate the School’s 40th year of existence took place on the Main Campus in Bloemfontein this week. At the opening were, among others, from the left: Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS; Dr Oluseyi Oyedele and Ms Viona Munjeri, both from The Atlantic Philanthropies; and Prof. Anita van der Merwe, Head of the School of Nursing at the UFS.
Photo: Leatitia Pienaar |
All eyes in the nursing profession in South Africa were turned to the University of the Free State (UFS) when the School of Nursing opened a state-of-the-art virtual health training and learning facility and celebrated its 40th year of existence with a gala dinner on the Main Campus in Bloemfontein this week.
The lustrous events were attended by dignitaries from all spheres of the health-care fraternity in South Africa.
The new virtual facility, The Space, is made possible by a grant of R16 million from The Atlantic Philanthropies and R1 million from the UFS. The Atlantic Philanthropies organisation is an international philanthropic organisation that is going to inject R70 million into nursing in South African over the next four years. The initiative will enhance nursing education and step up the quality of health-care delivery in South Africa. Four major grants were made to universities in South Africa, of which the UFS is one.
With the facility at the UFS School of Nursing, nursing education is propelled into the future. Prof. Anita van der Merwe, Head of the School of Nursing, says, “The virtual learning facility is a very new way of thinking and teaching. At the moment, theory and practice are separated, as theory is often taught in the mornings, followed by practical settings later in the day. Learner nurses then also go to clinical facilities for their practicals where the quality of care is declining and human resources are a problem.
“We believe that with new technologies such as e-learning and high-tech computer-mediated equipment we can use the ‘virtual world’ to bridge the theory-practice gap in the same location.”
Prof. Van der Merwe says the project is essentially about transformation: taking a stand against stagnation in nursing education and practice and daring to be different.
In the new virtual facility nurses will have the best of three worlds – the expertise of the facilitator/educator, simulation technology, and a vast selection of on-line and off-line software, exposing them to blogs, broadcasting and enhancing computer literacy. This will attract both the new “millennial” generation, which tends to be technologically competent, as well as the older learner because of the unthreatening learning environment.
The core space will accommodate 40 to 60 students and is designed to encourage informal, collaborative learning and practice simultaneously. It will have a demarcated area for “patients” (such as advanced adult and baby patient simulators) and a “clinic space” allowing for role play.
At the gala dinner, Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS commended nurses in South Africa for their caring role, but also expressed his concern that South African has lost its deep sense of care. South Africa is at a critical point and the country can be changed if a deep sense of care can be embedded again.
About forty nursing educators from all over South Africa attended an exploratory workshop in the facility today and the last meeting of the Forum of University Deans in South Africa (FUNDISA) also coincided with the festivities at the School of Nursing.
Media Release
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl.stg@ufs.ac.za
13 November 2009