On 31 July 2015 Council resolved to approve an investigation into appropriate technological devices to secure the confidentiality of the documentation provided to members of Council and Council sub-committees.
After an investigation led by the institutional registrar involving the Information Technology and Corporate and Information Governance departments, it was decided to launch a pilot project with EXCO using e-Fundi. The launch project was then extended to the Remuneration Committee of Council, Institutional Senate and finally the Council workshop and extraordinary meeting.
e-Fundi is the e-learning collaboration environment of the NWU. It can be described as a web-based eLearning, collaboration and research management system. It is designed to help lecturers, researchers and administrators to create many different types of course and project sites, with varying levels of complexity. Although essentially an eLearning environment, it can also be utilised as a collaboration environment for meeting administration and documentation. The site statistics of each site enables the Secretariat to monitor the usage of and activity on the site, thus increasing the security of documentation dramatically.
e-Fundi offers a broad spectrum of features, including tools for:
- administration
- communication
- voting
- sharing resources/documents
- collaboration
- scheduling
- virtual meetings.
This new development will effect a saving of nearly R10 000 for printing costs per Council meeting, and nearly R5 000 per Council committee meeting, not to mention decreasing the carbon footprint of Council and its committees.
This use of e-Fundi as collaboration site for meeting administration is to be rolled out to all committees being served by Corporate and Information Governance Services during 2016.
Council commended this new way of working and the enhanced security afforded by this innovation.