‘Tripartite curriculum strategy’ bridges work-academia gap

Higher education institutions in South Africa are at the helm of building an innovative, knowledge-rich, and resilient society. Yet, they are often criticised for producing graduates who are not ‘fit for purpose’ because of a disconnect between industry requirements and university curricula.

According to experts who shared their views at the first-ever in-person Higher Education Reform Experts South Africa (HERESA) training event held in Durban from 21-24 March 2022, work-integrated learning (WIL) can help narrow this gap.

The training workshop was held to capacitate HERESA partner universities in various thematic areas, including how to build WIL policies and infrastructure.

HERESA was launched in 2021 to build a network of experts dedicated to positively influence the higher education sector to achieve better institutional and learning outcomes, University World News reported on 15 March 2021.

In its inception, the initiative identified competency-based learning, work-integrated learning, curricula for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and leadership as challenges the higher education sector in South Africa is facing and which the project will tackle for its duration.

HERESA’s WIL session comes a week after Work Integrated Learning South Africa (WILSA) was launched at the 11th International Conference of the Technological Higher Education Network South Africa (THENSA) in Johannesburg on 15 March 2022.

What is work-integrated learning?

There are many opinions as to what WIL is. In some contexts, it is referred to as cooperative learning, in others, sandwich education, internships and even experiential learning, said Dr Henri Jacobs.

He is the director of Work-Integrated Learning and Industry Liaison at the Central University of Technology (CUT) in the Free State, a member of the Universities South Africa (USAf) World of Work Strategy Group and the chairperson of both USAf’s Learning in Practice Community of Practice and THENSA’s WIL task team.

“But, in all definitions, there are always three parties involved: the student, the university and the employer. In terms of a working definition, we can, therefore, say it is a tripartite curriculum strategy,” he said during a session of the training workshop on 21 March. All three parties come together to enhance the value of learning through alignment and integration of academic learning in the workplace, Jacobs added.

“In the South African context, we have various modalities of WIL that we speak of: work-based learning, the most common one, where students get placed in the industry. Then you’ve got project-based learning, and work-directed theoretical learning. All these form part of WIL,” he said.

WIL is a structured process. Students must achieve specific outcomes at the end of their placement because they are thoroughly assessed according to these outcomes.

Before placement, there are various requirements that both the learner and employer need to fulfil. Some of these preparations can involve industry-regulatory bodies. For example, according to the Engineering Council of South Africa, a company cannot have more than four students per engineer, Jacobs pointed out.

In other instances, students are matched with employers based on the employers’ needs, following engagements to clarify the role and expectations of the tripartite partnership, with training provided where necessary. Monitoring is also a key aspect of WIL.

CUT’s approach to WIL

In the case of CUT, the university established a workload model that makes use of cloud technology to capture and monitor the placement of students in the industry, and most importantly, clarify what resources the university needs to allocate to WIL.

“This model revealed that, in the end, if you have 40 students needing placement when following the placement process, you get to a total of 1,115 hours spent on WIL for the 40 students. The average time is almost 25 hours per student, so it becomes very labour-intensive,” Jacobs said.

Managed and developed by DevMan – a cloud-based solution for organisations primarily seeking to maximise their grant making, bursary and donor management potential – this technology is used by CUT to monitor the number of students placed across the various industries at a time for each of the faculties with a WIL component.

The university can monitor the duration of the placement, visits from the university and feedback, funding available to the student to support their WIL and other components such as communication between the university, the student and the employer.

An engagement approach followed elsewhere

Two continents away from Africa, Ireland’s Munster Technological University’s (MTU) approach to WIL stands on many legs, all of which are underpinned by the interface between university and industry partners.

“At the moment, MTU has about 18,000 students in total, and a very vast majority of undergraduate students undertake some form of WIL during their programmes,” said Professor Irene Sheridan, the head of MTU’s Extended Campus.

According to their LinkedIn profile, the Extended Campus is a unique facility established in 2011 to support the two-way engagement of individuals and organisations with academia for knowledge exchange, learning, research and development.

“We are driven by the idea that engagement is an institution-wide commitment. And that it shouldn’t just happen in isolation on the edges of the university, but it should be joint and developed together strategically,” Sheridan said.

Through engaging with its external partners, the university, using the Extended Campus, identified three types of engagement, each with a WIL component.

The first is engagements that help MTU “form the graduate”. These kinds of engagement, according to Sheridan, help the university support graduate formation and, to a large extent, work-integrated learning is a big part of moulding graduates.

Workforce development emphasised

The second type of engagement addresses workforce development. This includes hiring staff and developing talent for the organisations engaging with the university but, most importantly, re-skilling or upskilling those who are already in the workplace.

The third type of engagement identified by MTU’s Extended Campus speaks to research and innovation and involves the development of technical solutions, or knowledge solutions to support immediate difficulties in that workforce domain.

“Under the graduate-formation pillar, we have work placement, guest lecturing, site visits, work-based projects, but we also have the interaction of partners into curriculum development and syllabus review, so helping to make sure our graduates are work-ready, equipped with a current and relevant skills set.

“We place a lot of emphasis on the workforce-development pillar because it would be arrogant for a university to assume that the knowledge and skills that students gain now in their four years in college with us will be fit for purpose for an unknown future during a 40-year career filled with roles and responsibilities that we don’t know the names of and we don’t just yet imagine,” Sheridan pointed out.

The campus works with employers to identify new learning and skills as they are required and, together with the employers and the learners (in those cases the workers), co-design pathways to develop new skills to respond to those intermittent learning needs.

The training workshop will continue until 24 March, with each day session covering some of the thematic areas identified as challenges in South Africa’s higher education space.