Durban – In an attempt to boost academic support to students and decrease the university drop-out rate, researchers at Mangosuthu University of Technology (MUT) proposed a tutoring programme as a sustainable and efficient solution.
MUT’s director of public relations and Branding, Azwi Mufamadi, said it was widely accepted in the academic world that tutoring formed an integral part of any university’s academic support system.
“This is more so in the case of South Africa where a growing number of students, who are under prepared for university, join higher education institutions at the beginning of every year in search of academic success,” Mufamadi added.
The study was co-authored by the acting senior director of the Teaching and Learning Development Centre at MUT, Phiwayinkosi Gumede, and co-ordinator of Peer Assisted Learning and Foundation Provision Activities, Mashango Sithole, and it was published in the “Perspectives in Education” journal.
This study revealed that a “sustainable and effective tutorship programme, characterised by qualified and well-trained tutors, stable policy, adequate resources, effective co-ordination of the activities, and co-operation amongst key role players, is all that could help support students to be able to grasp the university style of teaching and learning, with resultant empowerment to do well in their studies”, he said.
Mufamadi explained that the study proposed that the tutoring programme should be approached as a system with interrelated components which worked together towards a common objective.
In their study, the two researchers proposed a tutoring programme as a subsystem with three pillars: inputs, transformation and output.
Input encompasses the key resources, role-players, beneficiaries and structure- equivalent to the tutoring policy.
Mufamadi said the study also cautioned that as much as policies were important, periodic reviews of these policies was vital to ensure that they responded to changes in external and internal environments.
According to the study, the bulk of the work happens at the second pillar, which is transformation. Mufamadi said transformation was where tutors were recruited, trained, and given the necessary support to effectively render their tutoring duties.
He said this was where the co-ordination of the tutoring programme took place – tutoring policies were developed, implemented and reviewed; along with tutorial venue allocations and monitoring the whole programme.
The output stage was when all of the effort produced a sustainable and effective tutoring programme.
Mufamadi said the most critical elements of this system were funding, co-ordination, tutors and policies.
“Tutorship should be considered an integral part of the university system, with adequate allocation of resources and efficient co-ordination of the tutorship programme activities.
“Long-term sustainability is pertinent, considering that tutorship programmes are one of the key interventions put in place by universities to ameliorate poor student success challenges, and are part of student support and development mechanisms,” he said.
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