3rd Global Conference The Idea of Education Monday 9th August - Wednesday 11th August 2004 Prague, Czech Republic Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 7: Performance, Development & Interdisciplinarity Chair: Brian Malindi Can Staff Development Efforts Sustain the Changing Landscape of Higher Education? Linda Alida du Plessis Director Teaching Development, Centre for Institutional Development, Vaal University of Technology, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa Staff development forms an integral part of any institutional strategy that seeks to maintain and enhance the value of its workforce. The National Plan for Higher Education in South Africa , which was approved by Cabinet in February 2001 has as its overall goal the transformation of the higher education system.  Institutions in South Africa are faced by global challenges including the widening of access and improved graduation rates, as well as the retention and articulation of learners from diverse backgrounds. The introduction of outcome-based education is probably the most significant educational reform in South Africa in the last century. These challenges, including the growing requirements for advanced technological literacy and major extension of research expertise directly impact on staff development. All staff needs to undergo a process of continuous professional development to facilitate these innovations in teaching, learning and research, and to meet the rising expectations of the student customer base and the demands of a changing labour market. The Vaal University of Technology has 4 satellite campuses, geographically dispersed. They also make use of contract staff. The challenge was to provide a flexible format of staff development programmes as well as to establish open lines of communication with all academic staff in an effort to raise the profile of the staff development function both within, and outside to the University. The second aim was to monitor and evaluate staff development efforts so as to continually improve staff development practice. This paper reports on the findings of the development of an online course to support staff development in a flexible format. The cyclic process that entails the identification and analysis of needs, design of the course, implementation, monitoring and evaluation are described as well as feedback from academic staff indicating future requirements are reported in this paper. Linking Law to Biotechnology through an Inter-disciplinary Process Marcel Dubé Faculté de droit, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada The assessment of higher education curricula always calls for a re-examination of different and alternate ways of learning and thus, of research and of teaching. In the field of vocational learning of Law, the traditional model of learning is evolving because of the growing necessity for lawyers to take into account not only the knowledge of its neighbouring disciplines (Economics, Politics, Ethics, Commerce), but also the know-how, skills, attitudes and even the culture itself of more distant disciplines like Medicine, the Sciences and one of the latest offshoots, Biotechnology. In the past few years, our Law School accepted that challenge and created a new LL.B. program with a cursus in Biotechnology (baccalauréat en droit avec cheminement en biotechnologie). The purpose of this paper is primarily to discuss the needs for such a cursus in the field of legal education for the Twenty-first Century, and only secondarily to present the nuts and bolts of the curriculum itself. To that effect, we will first present the specific goals of this cursus, showing the respective disciplinary roles of the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Science in that regard. In the second part, we will attempt to demonstrate that over and above that bi-disciplinary approach, the students must be exposed to the different patterns of researching and retrieving information, of solving problems and of formulating solutions. In other words, they must comprehend the particular way of thinking and of working of each discipline and integrate these various aspects into their own behaviour. This will be accomplished by acquiring a new learning “culture” developed within an inter-disciplinary environment integrating knowledge, collaboration and synthesis.