A Case Study on Training and Leadership

Author(s):  
Wapula N. Raditloaneng ◽  
Morgen Chawawa ◽  
Rakel Kavena Shalyefu

The challenge for African universities is to refocus their research and teaching missions to transform and revitalize the relationship between higher education and national development needs. Funded by British Academy African Partnerships (BAAP) programme, the University of Botswana, in partnership with The National University of Lesotho, University of Malawi and Calabar University in Nigeria, carried out 18 months of collaborative research project aimed at determining the implementation of Third Mission of Universities through rural community training and leadership. One of the two case studies, in D'Kar by Kellogg, in partnership with BA ISAGO University College yielded some very useful results. This included the necessity to build community leadership for sustainable development and the beginning of the poverty reduction process to take place.

Author(s):  
Wapula N. Raditloaneng ◽  
Morgen Chawawa ◽  
Rakel Kavena Shalyefu

The challenge for African universities is to refocus their research and teaching missions to transform and revitalize the relationship between higher education and national development needs. Funded by British Academy African Partnerships (BAAP) programme, the University of Botswana, in partnership with The National University of Lesotho, University of Malawi and Calabar University in Nigeria, carried out 18 months of collaborative research project aimed at determining the implementation of Third Mission of Universities through rural community training and leadership. One of the two case studies, in D'Kar by Kellogg, in partnership with BA ISAGO University College yielded some very useful results. This included the necessity to build community leadership for sustainable development and the beginning of the poverty reduction process to take place.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pier Francesco Cherchi ◽  
◽  
Marco Lecis ◽  
Marco Moro ◽  
◽  
...  

This paper illustrates a case study of teaching and research applied to the abandoned mining landscapes of the Sulcis area, located in the south-east side of Sardinia, one of the poorest in Europe. Although the region’s critical condition in the present, the area is nevertheless extremely rich in fascination and history. It offers unique natural landscapes, mostly pristine, a variety of archeological sites and, as mentioned, the ruins of the mining installations. All of this makes fore-seeable a concrete possibility of regeneration for the area, based on tourism, one of the island primary resources. The local institutions of Sulcis started a partnership with the University of Cagliari aiming to pursuit not just a practical and economical outcome in the immediate present, more a cultural and deeper rescue with a wider perspective. In the following pages, we present our academic activities in this mark and how we managed to guarantee fruitful superpositions of pedagogy, design, and research in our work within this kind of cooperation.Our focus is, therefore, the relationship between researching and teaching activities and the actions in support of the territory, pursued in a joint venture with the political institution. During these experiences, we defined a strategy to intercross these different layers, bringing the real and concrete dimension into our classroom, sharing our work with the students, and, at the same time, transferring the fruits of the teaching experiences to the territory. The correspondence between these two levels is not free of ambiguity and contradictions, however, we are convinced that it might show very important and fruitful outcomes.


Collections ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-343
Author(s):  
Olebogeng haladze ◽  
Susan O. eitumetse

Established in 1982, the University of Botswana (UB) library acquired various collections of missionaries, travelers, explorers, anthropologists, and colonial commissioners in its “Botswana Collection” section. One of these, the Heinz Collection, serves as the case study for this article and is evidence of the range of collections acquired from the library’s founding until 2010, when it ceased to be the sole national university in the country. The Heinz Collection documents the San/Bushmen/Basarwa’s (indigenous community in Botswana) way of life as documented by a former European civil servant. In researching the collection, the authors shed light on the collection’s significance and the cultural heritage of the indigenous San/Bushmen communities that Dr. Heinz lived among and documented during his lifetime. The collection illustrates the impact of social, economic, cultural, governance environments on a community’s way of life and, consequently, its cultural heritage.


Author(s):  
Girija S. Singh

COVID-19-related disruption in teaching in the University of Botswana led the school to prepare new strategies for running classes and to design innovative way of instruction.  The most notable change was to replace face-to-face lectures with online teaching at least partially (blended teaching and learning). This posed many challenges, especially in the teaching of science and technology subjects. In a laboratory-based discipline such as chemistry the problems encountered were especially daunting.  Moreover, writing mathematical equations, chemical reactions and reaction mechanisms posed their own difficulties.  The present communication provides a brief overview of how chemistry education at the University, the premier national university of Botswana, has been transformed during the last three semesters.  It is based on experience of the author and as judged by the feed-back received from colleagues and the students. Admittedly, the experience is limited and much discussion is still in progress to meet the unresolved challenges. Theory classes at undergraduate levels are now mostly taught online using packages such as Moodle and MS Teams. The tutorial and laboratory sessions have faced the greatest disruptions and the instructors continue to explore ways to conduct these virtually.  Online examinations were found to be limited in their effectiveness, especially in the assessment of drawing chemical structure and reaction mechanisms as well as the students’ ability in scientific writing.


Author(s):  
Fang Chiong (Patrick) Pu ◽  
Su Yian Kho ◽  
Ke Khoon Low ◽  
Amy Chou

As a discipline-neutral entity, knowledge exchange, and nexus of the university, the National University of Singapore (NUS) Libraries is the ideal conduit for bringing together faculties and departments to facilitate cross-disciplinary education and research. This case study gives a detailed walkthrough on the creation and design of the Research Skills Framework (RSF), which forms the backbone for all information literacy programmes (ILPs), specifically the flagship Researcher Unbound (RU) programme and RU Symposium, and shares challenges faced and future improvement plans. The exploration, design, and continual improvement of the programme ensured that NUS Libraries provides relevant and timely research support and enhances the digital information literacy skills of the NUS community. This programme continues to be a work in progress drawn from participants' feedback, attendance, experience, and insights from seven semestral runs and cumulative total of 172 workshop sessions.


Author(s):  
Keiphe Nani Setlhatlhanyo ◽  
Odireleng Marope ◽  
Richie Moalosi ◽  
Oanthata Jester Sealetsa

Due to colonisation and globalisation, ethnic cultures are changing and Botswana’s ethnic cultures are no exception to this change. This study aims to explore how the ethnic culture of different tribes in Botswana can be used to inspire the design of new products. A case study was conducted with students at the University of Botswana on particular themes of ethnic cultural knowledge, which inspired them to design futuristic innovative products. Visual analysis was used to assess the student designs for how they informed current trends without distorting their ethnic cultural meaning. The findings indicated that students were able to design using their own cultural heritage, to work in teams, thus, attaining soft skills, and to modernise ethnic cultural symbols to design symbolic, innovative, and futuristic products.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Begoña Gros ◽  
Manel Viader ◽  
Albert Cornet ◽  
Miquel Martínez ◽  
Jordi Palés ◽  
...  

The relationship between teaching and research in universities has been widely studied in the higher education literature, but no clear relationship between the two has been identified. Nevertheless, in recent years, research has been linked to a form of teaching that is more focused on the development of competences and learning capacity through enquiry and the generation of new knowledge. In this context, it is important for teachers and students to work together on the design of shared spaces for research and learning. This work examines the case of the University of Barcelona to analyse whether there is enough connection between research and teaching to allow students to experience this link and to successfully develop research competences. Teaching plans of the academic year 2018-19 were screened to identify research-related competences, the modules they appear in, and the descriptions of the evaluation systems. This information was compared to the students’ perceptions of the actual training they had received on these research competences. Results showed that teaching plans establish numerous competences related to research and generating new knowledge. However, students consider that this knowledge is not developed until the final year project.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 7734
Author(s):  
Álvaro López-Escamilla ◽  
Rafael Herrera-Limones ◽  
Ángel Luis León-Rodríguez ◽  
Miguel Torres-García

The AURA 1.0 prototype is a sustainable social housing proposal, designed by the University of Seville and built for the first Latin American edition of the prestigious Solar Decathlon competition. Different conditioning strategies were integrated into this prototype, optimized for a tropical climate, and focused on contributing positively to the health of the most humble people in society. In this moment, in which a large part of the world population is confined to their homes due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have the opportunity (and the obligation) to reconsider the relationship between architecture and medicine or in other words, between the daily human habitat and health. For this reason, this analysis of aspects derived from the interior conditioning of the homes is carried out. The main objective of the Aura proposal is to be able to extract data through a housing monitoring system, which allows us to transfer some design strategies to the society to which is a case study, in order to promote environmental comfort and, therefore, people’s health. The AURA 1.0 prototype develops flexible and adaptable living spaces, with a high environmental quality, in order to maintain the variables of temperature, relative humidity and natural lighting within a range of comfort required by the rules of the event. To achieve this end, the prototype develops an architectural proposal that combines passive and active conditioning strategies, using construction qualities and typical costs of social housing. These strategies allowed the project to achieve the first prize in the Comfort Conditions test. So, this paper presents an appropriate and tested solution that can satisfy comfortability and health of residents who live in social housing while maintaining low energy consumption.


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