Beginnings

Since 2022, the NWU has been conducting the PQM Review spearheaded by the Director of Q&APP. In 2023 a decision was taken to recalibrate the project and to combine it with the New Century Curriculum initiative. The DVC Teaching and Learning convened stakeholders and it was determined that a recalibration process be implemented to forge a way forward for the project now rebranded as the Tswelopele Project. The recalibration process will be concluded on the 12th April and this will signal the beginning of a new process for the Teaching and Learning Strategy in line with the decisions taken at the NWU UMC Bosberaad as the initiative is of strategic importance for the NWU and the stakeholders and communities it serves.

New Directions

21st century challenges present new imperatives for higher education. Not least of these is the need for students to be able to collaborate and cooperate in multidisciplinary teams in order to address challenges associated with so-called ‘wicked-problems’; be these in industry, society or the environment. The importance of developing adequate knowledge for expertise to be considered in a field, is as important as the skills needed to be able to learn from, and understand with, experts from other fields working in the same team, and addressing challenges, or project briefs, albeit from different perspectives.

This means that the NWU’s approach will be to streamline the University curriculum on the one hand and creating new opportunities for inter- and trans-disciplinary work to be undertaken by students and staff in the curriculum, on the other hand. Two University wide projects provide the basis for whole-of-institution change to be planned and implemented over a period of 6 years (2022-2026).

In fact, is the emergent (new century, new world, new disciplines, and new ways of working) that defines the urgency of curriculum work, now: in the face of threat to survival, climate catastrophe, conflict, and pandemic. Regarding this latter aspect, it is only in recent times, that a degree of clarity concerning the impact of Covid on education from 2020-2022 is coming to light.

In as much as interruption challenged the University, it also helped leadership to clarify and articulate the University’s position as regards online teaching and learning for contact as well as distance education, team-teaching (across campuses particularly), and technology, access and student success, student experience and the commitment of the University to social justice and an ethic of care. Other policies, strategies, and declaratory statements ((for example, the NWU Policy on Open Education Resources (2023), the NWU Declaration on the Decolonisation of University Education (2018), and the NWU Language Policy (2018)) also frame the two Projects described in this paper and link to academic planning done in the University’s faculties, as well as an emerging scholarship on issues pertaining to the transformation of the curriculum.

Up to 2023 however, the basis for such planning was informed by these policies, but from 2022 it is anticipated that the Programme, Qualification Mix Project (the PQM Project) and the New Century Curriculum Project (NCC Project) would also contribute to the planning of curricula and student experience across the University.

Coming Together

The table below offers a summary of the links and differences, between the two curriculum projects of the NWU. In the column associated with the PQM Project are described the aims of the Project which cumulatively can be described as the intention to streamline, reduce and rationalise the offering of programmes in excess of the minimum allowable credit loads and to equip the University with a sustainable means of managing the PQM in relation to its resource means. The NCC Project on the other hand, aspires, within the context of what is enabled through the PQM Project, to support the creations of the conditions necessary to revise the University’s curriculum within a set of four goals in which the inter- and trans-disciplinary opportunities are created for students to work in self-directed as well as collaborative and cooperative ways on team projects, particularly within the final year of undergraduate studies. This emphasis on self-directed, cooperative and collaborative work draws on the scholarship of teaching and learning which has gained ground and credibility in the past two decades as more research came to reveal the damaging effect of traditional teacher-centred approaches in higher education, especially in those contexts where there were not the opportunities to engage in workshop-based or laboratory-based work.

Tswelopele, Vooruitgang, Moving Forward

The PQM Project has already made discernible progress over the period of the past two years and its work will be consolidated in the recalibration, on the four above aims. A fundamental commitment to change will be needed to respond to challenges associated with the new century, not least of which are the occurrences and reoccurrences of global pandemics such as Covid, but also the persistence of serious structural issues associated with human economy as mentioned earlier (poverty, waste, and consumption management). Spirit is an appropriate term here because although the whole-of-institution curriculum change has already commenced at NWU, the one project (the NCC) has yet to be conceptualized and to commence, and thus is associated yet with aspirations rather than reporting on what has already occurred.  The Tswelopele Initiative is the vehicle for this.