Services

CHED offers specialized educational services and functions that are essential to enable the faculties to meet UCT’s educational goals. Some of our key functions are listed here:

• Careers Service: Aims to enhance the quality of UCT's graduates and help ensure they are equipped with the skills to fulfil their career ambitions
• Design thinking: The Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at UCT, known as the d-school, is one of only three in the world.  It uses a unique design-led mindset to unlock innovative human-centred solutions to complex problems.  The d-school offers both student and professional programmes as well as coaching training programmes to students, NGOs and government and industry leaders.  
• First-Year Experience: First-Year Experience (FYE) at UCT aims to support students through their first year at university.
• Lecture recording: The roll-out of lecture recording at UCT serves as a supplementary resource for face-to-face teaching for students and lecturers.
• MOOCs: Make or take a MOOC - Massive Open Online Course. MOOCs are free, have no entry requirements and are conducted online. 
• New Academic Practitioners' Programme: A holistic programme of professional development for new lecturers at UCT.
• National Benchmark Tests: A set of national tests that assess academic readiness of first year university students.
• One Button Studio: An automated video recording venue that requires no technical camera or audio equipment know-how.  It is essential to book the OBS. Some additional services, if required (e.g. teleprompter, video editing, are "paid for" services. To find out more, click here.  
• Online Teaching Resources:  A must-see repository for any lecturer wanting to venture into the online or blended teaching and learning arena!  The Centre for Innovation in Teaching & Learning offers a number of valuable resources aimed at facilitating and supporting teaching and learning at UCT with a focus on online/blended provision.  Resources cover information on a number of topics (such as assessment design and addressing inequity around technological access) to assist lecturers to diversify their offerings into the blended and online learning spaces. Additionally, resources include various How-to video guides to assist lecturers with online tools such as narrated PowerPoint presentations and collaborating in Google Drive.
• Postgraduate Support: Including Doctoral Retreat, Starting the PhD Journey; Writing Support; Careers Service; Vula collaboration and learning environment.
• Recognition of prior learning: If you do not have the required formal educational qualifications specified by the degree in which you are interested, but you believe that your age, work and life experiences have provided you with equivalent levels of learning, you can enquire about applying for admission through the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) process. 
• Stella Clark Teachers' Award: Each year, UCT students and staff are invited to nominate a teacher who is currently teaching in a secondary school and who, in their opinion, deserves recognition for years of dedicated teaching to students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Teaching (formal academic programmes and short courses):
  • Higher Education Studies (HES)  Studies aimed at professionalising teaching and learning practice in a rapidly changing higher education environment. They may be taken as stand-alone courses or accrue towards the Postgraduate Diploma in HES.
  • Facilitating Online (UCT short course) A course developed for change agent educationists and technologists within the African Higher Educational sector. 
  • Global Citizenship: The UCT Global Citizenship: Leading for Social Justice Programme is a co-curricular programme providing students with an opportunity to engage critically with contemporary global debates and to reflect on issues of citizenship and social justice. 
• UCT Formal Online Education Project (UFO-Project)  A strategic project funded by the VC's Strategic Fund which aims to strengthen and expand online education capacity at UCT. 
• Vula: UCT's online collaboration and learning environment. It supports teaching and learning and other related university groups and communities.
• Writing Centre: Provides a walk-in, one-on-one consultancy service for UCT students.