Month: October 2023

Building a sense of belonging for students who do not live on campus

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Students who do not live on campus and commute to university (often termed commuter students) can experience a sense of detachment from the university community, which can adversely affect their student experience. Juggling travel, studies, and other commitments means that these students can feel like they are visitors to their own campus.
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Fostering AI literacy as students, teachers, and researchers

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Credit: This blog post is an adapted form of a recent paper I wrote. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been present in society for several years – think, for example, of computer grammar-checking software, autocorrect on your phone, or GPS apps. Recently, however, there has been a significant advancement in AI research with the
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Improving students’ understanding by building a culture of academic integrity

Author: Lynette Pretorius. Credit: This blog post is an adapted form of a case study I wrote for Advance HE. Universities have been cracking down on cheating and all sorts of dishonest academic behaviour recently. They’ve rolled out a bunch of strict rules related to academic integrity and use fancy software to keep an eye
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Benefits of doctoral writing groups

Author: Lynette Pretorius. For many years now, I have been working to improve the experiences of PhD students. One practice I’ve found particularly useful is incorporating collaborative and peer-based learning through doctoral writing groups. My work with writing groups started way back in 2013 and, over more than a decade, I have further refined my
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Developing students’ critical thinking and clinical reasoning through problem-based assessment

Author: Lynette Pretorius. In clinical education, the challenge is to not just impart content knowledge, but also help students develop critical real-world clinical skills. This is particularly true when it comes to critical thinking and clinical reasoning skills. In a paper I recently wrote with colleagues from a midwifery unit, we demonstrate how constructive alignment
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