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UFS wins top awards at the 2024 Mace Excellence Awards

05 December 2024 | Story Dr Cindé Greyling | Photo Kaleidoscope

MACE Winners 2024 — From left to right: Burneline Kaars (Head: Employee Wellness and Organisational Development), Dr WP Wahl (Student Life Director), Linda Greyling (Senior Officer: Special Projects, Student Recruitment Services), Gerben Van Niekerk (Senior Officer: Kovsie Support Services), Malia Maranyane (Senior Officer: Undergraduate Marketing, Student Recruitment Services), Nomonde Mbadi (Student Recruitment Services Director), and Susan Van Jaarsveld (Senior Director: Human Resources).

On 28 November 2024, the University of the Free State (UFS) did it again – reigned as champions at the annual Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards and walking away with two of the top awards: the MACE Award for Outstanding Research and the Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence.

KovsieX was named the overall winner of the MACE Award for Outstanding Research. This award is made to the entry with the highest score in research, clearly demonstrating how research has supported the strategic objectives of the institution and the project. KovsieX is a multiplatform approach designed to leverage the strengths of diverse media channels. This digitalisation aligns with Vision 130, leveraging emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning quality and efficiency of non-academic support structures and systems.

The UFS’ entries were of such high quality that the university won the sought-after Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence. This award is based on the number of entries entered by an institution and the number and level of those entries winning awards. The award is therefore made to the institution with the highest success ratio.

Furthermore, the UFS Matriculant of the Year event received a Silver Award – entries scoring 5.75 or higher earn a Silver Award, placing this event among some of the top achievers in the events category. Three UFS entries received Gold Awards and were the winners in their respective categories: KovsieChat (Digital Channels), 2024 Women’s Day Breakfast (Events), and KovsieX (Stakeholder Engagement Campaigns). This is a magnificent achievement for the UFS.

"Winning a MACE award at this early stage is proof that KovsieX is not just meeting national standards – it’s setting them. If we can achieve this level of excellence now, imagine how we’ll compete on the global stage when the project is fully realised,” says Gerben van Niekerk, Student Media Manager.

Lacea Loader, Senior Director: Communication and Marketing and Coordinator of the MACE Excellence Awards, explained that a record number of entries were received for the Excellence Awards this year. “We are ecstatic about the direction of communication at the UFS and that the university has been able to maintain the quality of its entries in recent years,” says Loader.

The MACE Excellence Awards takes place annually as part of the MACE National Conference, recognising and celebrating excellence and the achievements of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement, and communication in the higher-education sector. This year, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) hosted the conference from 27 to 28 November 2024.

In 2023, the UFS won 11 awards, including the Chairperson’s Award of Excellence.

News Archive

School of Nursing receives a considerable grant

2011-06-01

Our School of Nursing once again became the proud recipient of a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies, an international organization dedicated to “bringing about lasting changes in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people”.

Atlantic Philanthropies granted millions of rands to South African nursing training institutions via University Based Nursing Education (UNEDSA), which will provide six recipient institutions the opportunity to transform nursing academic programmes in South Africa over a period of four years.

We recently received a R3 100 000 grant for the school to transform nursing scholarship and clinical practice. This is but the latest installment in a total grant of R16 million.

The School of Nursing, under the leadership of Prof. Anita van der Merwe, former Head of the School of Nursing, submitted a proposal to UNEDSA and was selected as one of the six recipients of the award. The school is now at the beginning of the third financial year of the project.

According to Dr Annali Fichardt from the School of Nursing, the school established a unique Virtual Health Teaching and Learning facility for training students in a non-threatening, simulated environment and to prepare nurses to be capable and to function optimally in the dynamic health-care environment. This provides opportunities for experimentation and sharing of integrated teaching and learning in nursing education.

The project helped establish a new unit for continuing professional development and research capacity development to serve practicing nurses and staff members of the School of Nursing. These initiatives will result in a fully transformed and accredited portfolio of programmes at undergraduate, post-basic and postgraduate levels to meet the needs of a range of health-care settings and learners.

The School of Nursing hopes to create an innovative teaching and learning environment that empowers students and professional nurses to become clinically excellent, able to practice independently in both resource-poor and technology-rich areas, and manage such complexities in an innovative way.

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