College of Business and Economics | Annual Report 2020 21 At College level, the deanery, directors of school and heads of departments worked at an extraordinary level and pace to ensure successful completion of the academic year. Governance of the changed approaches to course delivery was well managed. Teaching, learning, and assessment (TLA) plans developed at College level guided schools and departments in the development of their own plans. Monitoring of progress took the form of periodic reports to the deanery. Maintaining the integrity of assessment in the online environment was obviously crucial. At an initial College meeting, a contingency plan involving a College-wide shift to continuous assessment was set up, which gradually evolved into detailed module assessment plans. A range of models of continuous assessment emerged, both with and without a final assessment opportunity, as best appropriate to individual disciplines. Student performance showed that our approaches had indeed been successful. Module success rates increased overall to 90%, an increase of 5% against performance in 2019. The student dropout rate had increased from 11% in 2019 to 11,8% in 2020 but was well in line with the five-year trend. The academic staff in the College rose to the occasion and staff who were not yet familiar with online learning were aided by the various institutional support structures such as CAT, ICS, ADS, and the Academic Planning Division. Apart from the institutional development and provision of online resources to support TLA, academic staff members were motivated to find their own creative solutions to ensuring adequate student participation in the learning process. Academic staff primarily used Blackboard. Hence, there was a broad shift from using Blackboard simply as a communication and repository system, to one of active engagement with students in the learning process. Most staff adopted asynchronous modes of presentation, in the form of video recordings, audio recordings and written materials uploaded to Blackboard. This more student-centred approach allows students to better accommodate their engagement with learning materials within their full-time schedules. Academic staff also made use of other platforms to engage with students, such as Zoom, MS Teams, WhatsApp and Google Classroom. Monitoring of progress took the form of periodic reports to the deanery and other institutional committees. Blackboard Module Activity Reports played an important role in monitoring student activity. These reports often tended to indicate lower student activity than expected but this was because students would download all the material and work through them offline at their own time. However, student activity picked up significantly during times of assessments, which had to be conducted through Blackboard. In order to gain an understanding of students’ perceptions and expectations relating to online teaching and learning, the College conducted a student survey in May 2020 with 5 861 respondents (29% response rate, 50% first years, 40% senior undergraduates, 10% postgraduates, 46% NSFAS grant holders, and 24% supported by their families). Of interest was that students connected to UJ learning and teaching by phone (63%) and/or laptop (32%) with 61% reliant on UJ-sponsored data. About 18% were always connected to the internet, whereas 85% were able to connect over 12 hours. Students mostly connected with UJ between midday and midnight (62%), as many students had to attend to chores in the morning. Some 65% of respondents were negatively affected by study conditions, among whom 38% severely, drawing attention to the relevance of UJ residences as an enabling study environment. Despite several challenges, 78% of students considered their lecturers as ‘very good’ in online support during the lockdown. There remained, however, a significant number of students who indicated concerns in certain key areas which provided important insights into their sense of well-being, study conditions, access to devices etc. which the College then sought to address during the second half of the year. Residences created a platform for access to success and security, serving as a 69% strategically relevant driver in longer-term UJ CBE success. The second driver (36% relevant) was the attitude of lecturers towards their students conveyed in email and WhatsApp messaging. Finally, students described their experience of a great university in five themes. An outstanding university was depicted as 1) student-orientated and caring; 2) the academic project is facilitated, researched, taught, and managed by highly competent staff; 3) sensitive to specific student needs as opposed to one size fits all; 4) provides a techno-enabled, techno-empowered, and safe campus environment (e.g. residences); and finally, 5) charges reasonable tuition fees. Although a number of modules had already introduced blended learning in previous years, the sudden requirement in 2020 to move to online learning indeed gave great impetus to the need to ensure that students would be able to complete the academic year. The following is a
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