Open Learning for TVET College Lecturers
BACKGROUND
According to the White Paper on Post-Education and Training, the TVET sector is seen as “the cornerstone of the country’s skills development system … to address the country’s acute skills shortages” (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2013, page 12).
The White Paper also highlights the contribution to be made by open learning across the entire post-school sector in response to the competing imperatives of massively increasing enrolment and simultaneously improving quality – particularly quality as manifested in improved throughput and curriculum relevance (ibid. page 48). Open learning is seen as the construction of quality learning environments which take account of student context, foreground accessibility, and use the most appropriate and cost-effective methods and technologies.
The need for expansion in the TVET sector (2.5 million headcount enrolments by 2030) necessitates a significant increase in the number of lecturers qualified to teach in this sector. In addition, the demand for technical and vocational educators will be increased by the reintroduction of technical streams in basic (school) education as well as the projected establishment and proliferation of the new Community Education and Training (CET) colleges, for which technical and vocational education will form part of their qualification offerings.
Not only is the size of the current staff complement in colleges inadequate for this planned expansion, many TVET college lecturers have no professional teaching qualifications, or have professional qualifications to teach in, for example, primary schools.
In order to address this situation, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has sought proposals from the public universities in response to the newly approved qualifications set out in the Department’s Policy on Professional Qualifications for Lecturers in Technical and Vocational Education (this can be found on the Background Documents page of this website). Roughly half of the public universities have indicated an intention to offer at least one of the qualifications outlined in the policy.
Bringing together the two foci of (i) capacity building among TVET college lecturers and (ii) the promotion of open learning as a key means of addressing both the challenge of expansion and the difficulties of professional development for TVET lecturers who cannot regularly attend lectures themselves, the DHET hosted the workshop Capacity Building for TVET College Lecturers through Open Learning on 1 March 2016. The contents of this website are a record of that workshop. The site also provides access to the documents supplied at the workshop, as well as additional relevant documents.
These texts, especially the Workshop Report, combine to provide a good overview of the policy environment and the proposed activities aimed at capacity building for the TVET sector and at establishing a sustainable and effective, high quality open learning system for post-school education. We therefore encourage participants, as well as institutions which were not represented at the workshop, to engage with the documents and to draw the attention of colleagues to these texts.
The White Paper also highlights the contribution to be made by open learning across the entire post-school sector in response to the competing imperatives of massively increasing enrolment and simultaneously improving quality – particularly quality as manifested in improved throughput and curriculum relevance (ibid. page 48). Open learning is seen as the construction of quality learning environments which take account of student context, foreground accessibility, and use the most appropriate and cost-effective methods and technologies.
The need for expansion in the TVET sector (2.5 million headcount enrolments by 2030) necessitates a significant increase in the number of lecturers qualified to teach in this sector. In addition, the demand for technical and vocational educators will be increased by the reintroduction of technical streams in basic (school) education as well as the projected establishment and proliferation of the new Community Education and Training (CET) colleges, for which technical and vocational education will form part of their qualification offerings.
Not only is the size of the current staff complement in colleges inadequate for this planned expansion, many TVET college lecturers have no professional teaching qualifications, or have professional qualifications to teach in, for example, primary schools.
In order to address this situation, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has sought proposals from the public universities in response to the newly approved qualifications set out in the Department’s Policy on Professional Qualifications for Lecturers in Technical and Vocational Education (this can be found on the Background Documents page of this website). Roughly half of the public universities have indicated an intention to offer at least one of the qualifications outlined in the policy.
Bringing together the two foci of (i) capacity building among TVET college lecturers and (ii) the promotion of open learning as a key means of addressing both the challenge of expansion and the difficulties of professional development for TVET lecturers who cannot regularly attend lectures themselves, the DHET hosted the workshop Capacity Building for TVET College Lecturers through Open Learning on 1 March 2016. The contents of this website are a record of that workshop. The site also provides access to the documents supplied at the workshop, as well as additional relevant documents.
These texts, especially the Workshop Report, combine to provide a good overview of the policy environment and the proposed activities aimed at capacity building for the TVET sector and at establishing a sustainable and effective, high quality open learning system for post-school education. We therefore encourage participants, as well as institutions which were not represented at the workshop, to engage with the documents and to draw the attention of colleagues to these texts.