20/10/2021

Mr Luyolo Mahlangabeza, Lecturer in Business Management, was invited to be a panellist during the Early Career Academics Advancement Programme (ECAAP) online shared learning session on 29 September 2021.


The purpose of the session was to:

  1. Learn from and with others in a supportive and collegial environment at a variety of levels from across Nelson Mandela University.
  2. Build a network of colleagues from across the University and discipline areas.
  3. Develop and refine important team skills such as negotiating, influencing, and giving and receiving feedback.

 

Mr Mahlangabeza’s presentation was based around responding to the prompt: ‘What is excellent teaching and how do I demonstrate excellence in my teaching’. He responded by saying, ‘Excellence in teaching includes the ability to adapt teaching pedagogies to the diversity of interests and aptitudes of students’. He then elaborated by explaining that some of the modules taught in academia use abstract language, for example ‘neural networks and algorithms’. Therefore, many students struggle to understand such concepts. How one adapts his or her teaching pedagogies goes a long way in contributing to excellence in teaching.

 

He further lamented the need to continuously engage the mind of students because of the many contextual and environmental distractions that come with online learning. This contributes to the purpose of transferring meaningful academic knowledge and also to promote the overall well-being of all students.

 

His presentation contributed to the advancement of early career academics at Nelson Mandela University. The experiences and expertise he shared certainly contributed to the success of other academics. His presentation was indeed a contextualised experience that will enable our learning and teaching practices to be ‘in service to society’. The ECAAP programme is run by the Teaching Development Unit.