Our vice-chancellor's review
Introduction: Looking at 2021
Teaching and learning had to be managed in 2020 and 2021 through contingency planning based on our experiences of past disruptions and emergencies.
As time passed, Senate and the faculty governing bodies and committees developed a routine of refining and adjusting the faculty assessment plans in such a way that our responsiveness to changing lockdown levels, and the associated Covid-19 “waves”, has become more normalised.
(This in no way downplays the gravity of our situation as a nation, or the loss and pain experienced as a result of the impact that Covid-19 has had on lives, families, communities and workplaces.)
- Reflection, rather than reaction
This normalisation has made reflection (rather than reaction) possible and has improved our ability to learn from and act on past experience.
In the case of 2021 and 2020, past experience is available to us in the form of shared institutional, sectoral and international experience, whether in the form of teaching and learning activities or through seminars, webinars, colloquia or scholarship. Our academics and leadership have drawn visibly from these experiences.
The pandemic has also necessitated a relook of our student value proposition in relation to teaching and learning, which may be described as follows: the NWU offers a contact teaching and learning experience, with students in contact with academics for both the contact and distance modalities.
- A new, hybrid approach
What has changed is that face-to-face teaching-learning now takes place in small groups, as does online (synchronous) teaching and learning. This is in anticipation of the continued threat of Covid-19 and the need for physical distancing. There is a possibility of a lasting shift towards the “flipped” classroom, whereby large-group lectures are available online and purposeful smaller-group teaching and learning takes place in a face-to-face setting.
Within this hybrid approach, technology is used to enable better self-pacing, self-direction and collaborative learning (asynchronous and synchronous) in online and face-toface contact teaching and learning. These dimensions also allow for adjustment in relation to further fluctuations in lockdown levels.
Our managerial and administrative activities
Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the commencement of the national lockdown at the middle of March 2020, we have proven ourselves to be an agile institution, ready to embrace change.
Our new approach to teaching and learning has been supported with an investment in technology infrastructure. It also provides us with an opportunity to reconsider our staff value proposition and to implement a more flexible work environment. We have now moved from an emergency remote teaching and learning strategy to a more personalised student experience.
Adequacy of staffing levels, particularly in critical areas
Talented, energised staff who are innovative and highly skilled are key to our aspirations as an internationally recognised university.
As such employees are in demand in the higher education sector, we are responding by using talent management mechanisms such as strategic workforce planning, talent attraction and management, recruitment, optimal remuneration management, training and development and performance management, as well as succession planning to attract and retain staff.
We broadened the scope of our scarce and critical skills programme. Having already implemented this programme in the academic environment, we attended to the roll-out in the support environment in 2021.
The total staff headcount stood at 9 399 in 2021, up from 8 078 in 2020.
Since we have had to reprioritise our budget and optimise out staff-cost budget, only mission-critical positions were filled in 2021.
| Total staff headcount – 2020 vs 2021 | ||||||
| Classification | Permanent | Temporary | Total | |||
| 2020 | 2021 | 2020 | 2021 | 2020 | 2021 | |
| Academic | 1 632 | 1 648 | 373 | 1 414 | 2 005 | 3 062 |
| Support | 2 454 | 2 492 | 3 619 | 3 845 | 6 073 | 6 337 |
| Grand total | 4 086 | 4 140 | 3 992 | 5 259 | 8 078 | 9 399 |
The overall attrition rate is 6,0%, well within our projected attrition rate of under 10%.
Realising equity targets in the workplace
Employment equity targets continued to be closely monitored by Council’s People and Culture, Employment Equity Committee and its Transformation Oversight Committee.
Our current employment equity plan runs from January 2021 to December 2023. The targets and outcomes for 2021, based on the three-year plan approved by Council on 10 September 2020, are shown in the following table.
| Race | 2021 Target | % Total | 31 Dec 2021 Actuals |
31 Dec 2021 % Total |
Difference | Target Achieved Y/N |
||
| Male | Female | Male | Female | |||||
| African | 21,02% | 19,58% | 40,60% | 19,61% | 18,68% | 38,29% | 2,31% | N |
| Coloured | 3,09% | 3,89% | 6,98% | 2,96% | 3,97% | 6,93% | 0,05% | N |
| Indian | 0,82% | 1,05% | 1,88% | 0,73% | 0,83% | 1,56% | 0,32% | N |
| White | 18,71% | 30,71% | 49,42% | 19,38% | 32,09% | 51,47% | -2,05% | N |
| Foreign nationals | 0,9% | 0,23% | 1,12% | 1,38% | 0,38% | 1,76% | -0,64% | N |
| 44,54% | 55,46% | 100,00% | 44,06% | 55,94% | 100,00% | 0,00% | ||
For the second year, the moratorium on staff vacancies to contain costs in response to the Covid-19 challenges negatively affected our ability to reach the employment equity targets.
The new employment equity plan for 2021 to 2023 has proportional targets for blacks, women and people living with disabilities. The new plan, which Council has approved, focuses on the following four main strategies:
- Removing barriers for attracting people from the designated groups and people living with disabilities
- Succession planning for key positions
- Retention strategies
- Establishing an enabling organisational culture
The quality of information available to management
In 2021, we undertook initiatives aimed at enabling data-driven management decisions. We introduced a new platform to make integrated institutional data sets available to our different stakeholders, and developed and launched PowerBI dashboards, with training for end-users. (PowerBI is Microsoft’s interactive data visualisation and analytics tool for business intelligence, or BI.)
These developments enhanced our ability to use learning analytics and conduct scenario planning. The integrated information from PowerBI was invaluable during the budget-planning process, especially in identifying priorities and ensuring equity of provision, and we used this to inform our risk mitigation strategy.
High-quality, reliable information is essential for decisionmaking that secures the long-term financial sustainability of the NWU and manages the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our financial position. Consequently, we are focusing strongly on financial viability modelling and scenario planning.
Student services and co-curricular activities
The Student Life portfolio managed to retain the most critical and valuable segments of support and opportunity available to our students during the 2021 academic year.
The immediate impact of the pandemic resulted in a reduction of face-to-face interactions between our students and the university. Offsetting this as best we could, we migrated contact-based activities and -services to the online environment.
Although many of our students embraced the virtual space and platforms, such interaction could not replace the entire co-curricular and student-services offerings. However, this necessary migration still created valuable platforms for student engagement and continued student service delivery.
Notable improvements included the successful execution of the student-leadership electoral processes by means of digital and online resources, resulting in increased access and participation by eligible student voters and candidates. Similarly, arts, culture and social-cohesion activities continued through smaller virtual engagements
Counselling support services and psychosocial crisis interventions were accessible to all students through eFundi and telecommunications and video-conferencing platforms. Our campus health care centres resumed primary health care services as students gradually returned to campuses throughout the various national alert levels.
We also used virtual platforms to continue offering students and student leaders opportunities to obtain valuable skills in project management, fundraising, teamwork, social responsibility and cultural integration.
Concurrently, we identified critical shortcomings in student-service delivery and put mitigating measures in place to provide interim solutions while planning and developing long-term solutions. These had to do with the DIY service platform and systems, administration of student finances and academic matters and the development of applications to engage students on transformation and diversity.
For more information about our academic support activities for students,turn to the section Increase student access and success..
Changing patterns in the provision of academic courses
We are making steady progress in executing our strategy of enrolling more students in the fields of science, engineering, technology and commerce.
In total, 53 469 students were enrolled at our three campuses in 2021. Female enrolments decreased from 35 915 to 33 665, while male enrolments, at 19 804, decreased from 20 150 as in 2020.
Since receiving ministerial approval for the NWU qualification and programme offering in August 2020, our faculties have been hard at work developing or establishing qualifications.
All eight faculties amended programmes, most of which were in education, health sciences and natural and agricultural sciences. Two new pioneering qualifications have been accredited and registered.
The BEdHons (Language Education) affords students the opportunity of specialising in any of seven South African languages and supports the NWU multilingualism policy. The Bachelor of Human Resource Development Honours is the first honours degree in South Africa solely in the field of human resource development, emphasising the shift from management towards development.
Academic programmes that extend our niche-area offering are the addition of e-science to the MA (Development and Management), which will be offered from 2022. Work is progressing on the MSc equivalent in e-science for 2023 implementation. Both programmes will be joint degrees offered in collaboration with the University of the Witwatersrand under the auspices of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The new Master of Commerce in Information Systems is aligned with current international trends. Similarly, we have added Social Inclusion and Development to the Doctor of Philosophy in Social Sciences. The Bachelor of Health Sciences Honours in Sport Science is intended to contribute to the scarce skills field of human science.
Self-assessment of our achievements
In hindsight, it is clear that we were more prepared for the disruption that Covid-19 caused than we had thought at the time of the outbreak in 2020. The university already had several strategies and mechanisms in place that had an effect on our readiness and made it possible for us to switch to an emergency remote modality within a month.
The NWU’s distance education capabilities: two years before the pandemic, the university decided to expand the use of distance delivery by making more off-campus offerings available. This gave students and staff the experience to work in an offline-online space. As a result, the NWU’s structures, management, staff and students were reasonably well prepared for the Covid-19 disruptions. For example, lecturers were already equipped to teach on the eFundi learning management system and were able to implement emergency remote teaching and learning fairly quickly.
Responsiveness in addressing inequities: the university provided learning materials, devices and data to students experiencing digital inequalities.
Visionary thinking: the proactiveness of the Innovative Teaching and Learning with Technology Community of Practice helped the NWU community to adopt and adapt to the emergency remote approach. (A community of practice is a group of people sharing an interest and learning to do it better by working together).
Future proofing: the 21 Futures Task Team, a relatively small team of experts from across the TL environment and key support units, strategised and initiated a variety of initiatives for 2021 amid the challenges experienced in 2020. This has put the NWU in a better position to face further possible disruptions.
The results of all our efforts are visible in the improvement in our dropout rate from 11,48% in 2020 to 8,96% in 2021. This is an indication of the success of our efforts to reach all our students and to continue and successfully complete the academic year.
Looking to the future
The pandemic has also brought significant changes and constraints in the research sphere at the NWU, which nevertheless remains in the top seven institutions in South Africa in terms of research outputs.
It is interesting to note that African scientists’ share of the world’s publications has been increasing over the past 20 years, rising from 1,5% to 3,85% of the total contribution to the world’s research publications.
The top seven institutions in South Africa published about four times more than the contributions from all other institutions combined in Africa, showing that the NWU is indeed fulfilling its dream to be an internationally recognised university in Africa.
Finally, we envisage embracing the 4IR and supporting our staff members to become involved in national and international research collaboration.
DR BISMARK TYOBEKA
VICE-CHANCELLOR
