Outreach Planning Meeting held March 19 & 20, 2012

As part of third year implementation of the Outreach Project, RUFORUM organised a  two-day planning and review meeting to co-design and pilot an experiential learning model with stakeholders for enhancing the impact of university research and training, particularly at postgraduate level, at participating universities[1]. More specifically, the meeting discussed opportunities and challenges for integrating experiential learning and entrepreneurship into specific courses and programmes at the three universities.

The meeting was building on the field gap analysis/ institutional analysis undertaken during year one of the project that identified gaps and opportunities for integrating experiential learning into courses and departments training, research and outreach programmes and the comparative analysis of good practice in integrating experiential learning into universities curriculum. During the meeting, the project also drew lessons (experiences and challenges) from an EDULINK project “Strengthening University Capacity for Rural Innovation Processes (SUCAPRI)” that had just closed and Earth University in Costa Rica. The meeting was held at Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel, Entebbe, Uganda from 19th-20th March 2012 and it was attended by both European and African partners among other stakeholders from Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Private Sector.   The two day meeting employed group and plenary discussions as a platform for joint project review and planning. The presentations on the field gap analysis, the Earth University model and an overview of the outreach project (Annex IV) in addition to group presentations provided more insights for the group discussions and enriched roundtable discussions; in addition to guest presenters (Gerard den Ouden-Programme Management Unit ACP S&T).  

During the plenary, the participants highlighted some of the challenges in implementing student centered learning. Some of the issues raised included:

• In the outreach model that was presented by Richard Hawkins, participants felt that strategic research was a missing component that should be included.
• There was need for institutions to clearly identify which aspects from ongoing projects were relevant to Experiential Learning(EL) rather than generalising
• Participants also observed that EL is currently restricted to classroom. They suggested that EL should extend beyond teachers and classrooms if mindsets were to be changed to involve institutions. For example, the institutions should have a strategy to enhance EL in addition to providing teaching space.
• Participants also wanted to know how to turn the technical aspects of their curricula experiential including values and requested RUFORUM to spearhead the process
• There was need to devise a mechanism for consolidating all experiences in a given university to out scale best practices to inform institutional change
• From SUCAPRI experiences, it was found necessary to organise a workshop to document EL best practices to develop a manual together with the School of Education or a Quality Assurance manual on EL to be used as an tool for improvement
• It was necessary to define what skills were needed for academic staff to facilitate Experiential learning as this was not presented during the presentations
• There were concerns about how to make University-Industry (private sector) linkages mutually beneficial
• Participants suggested that RUFORUM takes the lead in the development of an Experiential Learning manual to serve as a reference materials in its consortia universities

For more information please contact the RUFORUM Secretariat on secretariat@ruforum.org