Past Recipients – Teaching Innovation Grant Awards (TAGSC)

Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
 

Project Title: ‘Picture OT’: A visual and multi-lingual open access textbook to support theory application in practice for Occupational Therapy (OT) Students
 

Description: The project was to develop an open-access e-textbook, focused on OT theory and its application in practice for undergraduate OT students in South Africa. It was picture-based/illustrated, and multi-lingual, with the purpose of creating an accessible resource for all students across the country. It was a collaborative project, with recent graduates (past three years) developing the illustrations and text per topic, and overseen and edited by two OT educators. The use of existing theory and resources was also incorporated.

Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), Language Development Group (LDG); Academic Development Programme (ADP)
 

Project Title: Transforming an existing journal article into a central hypermedia for the acquisition of academic literacy on a first year academic literacy cours
 

Description: We aimed to transform an existing academic journal article into a central hypermedia which included hyperlinks to chapters in books; journal articles; relevant websites; videos; AI platforms; etc. Through such a text, we wanted to bring to the surface some of the hidden and complex “traditional” literacy practices that informed the creation of academic texts and interrogated these alongside the “new” (such as student uses of AI). In doing so, we endeavoured to widen epistemic access for students.

Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
 

Project Title: The development of a teaching and learning model and resources which are informed by Horizontal and Vertical Homogenization of teaching and practice in the CLDP (Child Learning Development and Play) OT curriculum
 

Description: At the time, content aiming to develop students’ competence in CLDP was delivered in siloes across various courses in the four-year undergraduate occupational therapy programme. There was minimal integration of the content, which meant that students frequently struggled to develop holistic interventions to address the occupational needs of children.
This project aimed to do this by:

• mapping the content of the CLDP teaching content, approaches, and assessment in OT and service courses to determine duplication, points of connection, and gaps

• in consultation with CILT, developing innovative teaching and assessment methods to help students develop a holistic approach to identifying and addressing occupational needs in contextually relevant and evidence-based ways

Humanities, Umthombo Centre for Student Success
 

Project Title: Creative methods for landscape research: a toolkit
 

Description: This project developed a resource kit in the form of an online and printed resource in book form, aimed at scholars, artists and other creative practitioners and educators interested in exploring the theory and materialities of landscape through interdisciplinary readings and methods. It grew out of a fieldwork-based postgraduate course that the collaborators had co-taught for several years and a recent walking-workshop series, group art exhibition, and symposium that they co-led.

Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Pathology
 

Project Title: Development of 3-D printed models for teaching and learning in trauma analysis.

Description: The project planned to 3D print replicas of long bones fractured under 3-point bending for utilisation in trauma analysis education in forensic anthropology and forensic pathology. Sixty (60) lamb femora had been previously fractured under 3-point bending for research assessing impact direction from fracture surfaces. This project aimed to produce 3D printed models of the fractured bones scanned with a hand-held 3D scanner. The study would assess consistency of deriving trauma measurements from 3D printed models and the utility of the models in trauma education.

Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), Academic Development Programme (ADP)
 

Project Title:  Unleashing engaged scientists
 

Description: We wished to produce two additional chapters for our digital openly-licensed book for first-year BSc students (Science is Tough (But So Are You!)). The working titles of these additional chapters were ‘A future in science’ and ‘You are because we are’. Funding was required for a writing workshop to co-create content with students, as well as editorial assistants, illustration and typesetting.

Faculty of Science, Department of Chemistry
 

Project Title: Design and development of virtual ‘interactive selector’ chemistry practicals to enhance undergraduate student engagement
 

Description: This project focused on the development of interactive digital resources to assist first-year chemistry students from various faculties (Science, Engineering and Health Sciences) with the practical component of their courses. Creating these pre- and post-practical digital resources positively impacted the curriculum by exploring new ways to engage with students, reinforcing conceptual knowledge and enabling students to be better prepared in their pre-practical preparation.

Faculty Sciences, Department of Mechanical Engineering (EBE),
 

Project Title: Languages and literacies for accessing, learning, communicating, and transforming mechanical engineering knowledges, practices, identities, and values: The case of ‘sustainability’ in MEC1005W.
 

Description: Our focus was curriculum for the knowledge area ‘sustainability’ in the core first-year mechanical engineering course MEC1005W, a key focus of the two, four-year professional degree programmes. Our curriculum - comprising knowledge, module design, learning resources and activities, assessment strategy, pedagogy, and tutor support approach - aimed to create opportunities for (1) accessing, learning, and communicating currently dominant engineering knowledge, and (2) critiquing and transforming what might have been considered legitimate knowledges for contemporary local and global conditions.

Commerce, College of Accounting,
 

Project Title: Business Acumen for Accountants course development
 

Description: Business Acumen for Accountants is a new course to be introduced for first year accounting students, based on the curriculum changes from the South African Institute for Chartered Accountants (SAICA). This course aims to expose students to the basic operations of a small business using real-life scenarios, including exposing the students to the SDGs and how they impact on business, using the integrated thinking model.

Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Family, Community and Emergency Care
 

Project Title: Coaching future clinical leaders: a revised approach to delivering a leadership and governance module
 

Description: Family physicians were seen as leaders in strengthening team-based primary care services. A leadership and governance module in the third year of the MMed (Family Medicine) programme required alignment with updated national learning outcomes, as well as a revised mode of delivery. Following a series of stakeholder engagements, the revised module was piloted in 2022 using a coaching style to facilitate reflection on learning and leadership development.

Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Health Science Education
 

Project Title: Professionalism: Do we practice what we preach?
 

Description: The curriculum change the study aimed to implement was to adjust the existing curricula for undergraduate students and introduce CPD courses. Through redesigning classroom activities, it aimed to improve the effectiveness, relevance, and quality of education as it related to professionalism. The study sought to establish how and where health sciences students identified (un)professional behaviour and how they reacted to it. It involved 4th-year health sciences students from the Medical and Rehabilitation programmes. Fourth year was a suitable point as medical and Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech, Language, and Audiology students engaged in clinical exposures.

Faculty of Health Sciences, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
 

Project Title: Enabling critical interpretations of Professionalism and professional identity in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
 

Description: This project brought together disciplines in Health and Rehabilitation to collectively apply a decolonial and African-centred critique to notions of professionalism and professional identity-making as it occurred within practice/clinical courses in Speech Therapy, Audiology, Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Disability Studies and Nursing and Midwifery. The aim was to use insights generated from this lens to develop a professional identity change guideline that could be used within each course. This guideline was designed as part of transformative learning opportunities where students drew on their experiences as processes of professional identity-making to develop their professionalism during practice/clinical learning. Introducing these new learning opportunities through a guideline for reasoning when developing professional identity contributed to producing a healthcare workforce that addressed health inequities, as proposed by the Lancet Commission on Education of Health Professionals for the 21st Century (Frenk et al., 2010).

Faculty of Humanities, The Department of Sociology
 

Project Title: From the Sociological imagination to social imaginary: rethinking Sociology from the tip of Africa
 

Description: In the third stage of a multi-year review of the undergraduate sociology curriculum, we began to re-imagine key themes we had identified as being central to our vision of the social imaginary. The previous two stages of our review, which took place 2019-2021, examined 1) the existing curriculum through detailed metric analysis of content, loads, credits, sequencing etc. and 2) an in-depth review of who we were as a collective of staff, students, tutors and how we positioned and identified the Department in a series of workshops guided by the expertise from CHED, especially Prof Kasturi Behari-Leak. We then envisioned what a reimagined curriculum might look like from the tip of Africa.

Faculty of Health Science, Human Biology
 

Project Title: Promoting student engagement and self-directed learning: A pilot study focused on the design and implementation of an interactive App
 

Description: This study aimed to develop an interactive App that could be used by students to 1) monitor and reflect on their academic performance and 2) provide access to a pool of discipline specific tutors. The App was used as a feedback system allowing each student to monitor their academic performance in real-time. It was anticipated that access to the App would promote a transformation in how students learn, by promoting critical reflection and learner agency.

Faculty of Health Science, Orthopaedic Surgery
 

Project Title: Orthopaedic curriculum change and student-centred content creation for undergraduate medical students
 

Description: This project was embedded in a consensus-based transformation process of the orthopaedic undergraduate curriculum. An open source online student book and augmented learning resources were generated via a student-centred collaboration. The funding was used to expand the student book by an additional 11 chapters, to create 6 case-based visual posters and to support its upload and configuration on Amathuba as well as UCT library.

Faculty of Health Science, Primary Health Care Directive
 

Project Title: Challenging the cycles of violence: creating an open access online textbook for future responders Pilot Project
 

Description: This project provided a pilot to a bigger process of creating an open online textbook to support future health and social work professionals to respond effectively to people and communities affected by interpersonal violence.
Framed by a ‘trauma-informed approach’ to practice, the final book held the parallel foci of caring for survivors and reflective professional self-care. It included content from leading researchers, lecturers, students, and community members, broken into themes to show links, with separate chapters focusing on introducing, understanding, and managing each area for junior, intermediate and senior students. There was no such resource available.
The pilot focused on one section of the book – probably on managing gender-based violence.

Faculty of Health Science, Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
 

Project Title: Disability Inclusive Development module- Design and implement an interprofessional module in the undergraduate curricula of the five undergraduate programmes in the Faculty of Health Sciences
 

Description: The project aim was to design a module on Disability Inclusive Development (DID), using an interprofessional collaborative design approach. The module was to be offered to all the undergraduate programmes in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences (years 1-4) and to the MBChB programme (years 1-4). The teaching and learning activities were done in an interprofessional way that aimed to encourage students from different professions to learn together, to collaborate and to practice in an interprofessional manner. Three of the key project outputs included an interprofessional intervention during practice learning in year 3 and 4 of study, ongoing responsive health promotion or community/practice learning based interventions as well as the building of relationships and networks between UCT faculty members, students and the communities in which they did practice learning.