The rapid education transformation in South African education over the past decade (1994-current), forced Institutions of Higher Learning to critically examine their own practices. The transformation of the post apartheid South African education system is largely driven and determined by a social and economic agenda. At institutions of higher…

Various reasons may be advanced for conducting proficiency tests in academic literacy at higher education institutions. The Standardised Assessment Test for Access and Placement (SATAP) aims at determining the academic literacy skills that entry-level students should demonstrate as a predictor of their preparedness and success in tertiary…

Technology improvements in education created new methods, opportunities and challenges for teaching and learning. Globally Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) integrate the Internet and technology into teaching and learning. This is a challenge for lecturers not trained for this mode of course delivery. However, HEIs should improve and supplement…

Approximately one in every three students entering higher education in South Africa will have dropped out by the end of their first year of study. Under-preparedness has repeatedly been cited as one of the most common causes, with academics suggesting that many students lack the reading and writing skills they need to be successful at university.…

The use of effective knowledge management is becoming an essential part of technical development projects in order to enable developers to handle the growing complexity of these projects. In this article we discuss an innovative approach to address this concern from the perspective of an undergraduate engineering curriculum. Instead of adding…

An extensive literature on leadership theories and models concerns large organizations in industry and has been developed mostly by outside researchers with expertise in conducting large surveys on and interviews with "subjects" in leadership positions. Recently, such theories have been adopted or adapted to higher education in South Africa. These…

Quality assurance in medical education is a complex matter. Institutions and external critics of accreditation processes often question the objectivity of peer judgements. Members of accreditation panels similarly often feel at a loss for a lack of mechanisms to help them arrive at a collective assessment of the performance of an institution. In…

Sociology invites transformations among first year students which go through at least three distinct levels. At the conceptual level, three basic concepts, debunking, relativizing and system-relating, challenge public opinion modes of thinking. But students in this course go beyond explicit course examples and perform these notions in a more…

When final year medical students reporting poor prescribing confidence were tested, key prescribing weaknesses emerged. This study aimed to characterize student variability in both the experience of and cognitive levels displayed during prescribing. Blooms Taxonomy cognitive categories were assigned to each question of a student test measuring…

Worldwide there seems to be an interest in enhancing the student learning experience through particularly interactive learning, which is an educational philosophy that places the student at the centre of the learning process. Such an approach acknowledges the educational contexts from which students come. What is even more important is the fact…

This article reports on an analysis of person attributes of e-learning practitioners at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). Findings from a study of the latent structure of an e-learning practitioner construct, are presented to illuminate the characteristics and personal profiles of the e-learning practitioners at TUT. Rich sources of…

There has been considerable debate on the nature of scholarship over the past two decades. A key contribution to this debate is a seminal work in which Boyer (1990) articulates an expanded notion of scholarship. One of the four functions of scholarship that Boyer identifies in this expanded view of scholarship is the scholarship of integration. In…

The study sought to investigate male and female roles in intimate sexual relationships and their implications for HIV/AIDS among students in institutions of Higher Education in Zimbabwe. The sample (N = 118) voluntarily participated in this study. Fifty-eight participants came from a church related university while 60 were from a state owned.…

This article presents a summary of the concerns and the demographic data collected from clients at the Student Counselling Service (SCS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, during the period of March 2001 to April 2003. First-time presenting clients who are enrolled students, were asked to ill out an anonymous questionnaire, of…

This study explores the usefulness of reflexive photography for qualitative research in the human and social sciences. The investigation was done in the context of how male academics construct their world in a university during transformation. A group of white, male academics in the human sciences were provided with a camera and were requested to…