Academic staff development: A lever to address the challenges of the 21st-century university classroom

This paper reports on how a university of technology used design research to plan and roll out an academic staff development programme so as to influence the institutional throughput rate. The study forms part of the institution’s effort to understand and address the generally unsatisfactory performance of the South African higher education system in facilitating the success of the majority of the student population. The programme is grounded in the constructivist paradigm. The paper examines the major aspects of the programme namely, the preliminary phase, the teaching experiment and the retrospective analysis. The study established that this initiative, while necessary, was not sufficient on its own to make an impact of the magnitude that is required given the enormity of the problem of student low throughput rate. It is therefore recommended that the university under study, in collaboration with other universities, explore and implement more impact-oriented action plans that are meant to enhance student learning outcomes.