Workshop 2 Addis Ababa 2020

The TEA-LP held its second capacity building workshop in February 2020 in Addis Ababa. Once again, the event brought together the 8 partner university teams for three days of intense discussion, planning and working through detailed aspects of curriculum development.

This workshop focussed on how to develop the skills needs identified in universities’ sector needs assessments in their curricula’s learning outcomes, teaching practices and learning activities.

The workshop had three main objectives:

• To continue to strengthen the partnership, developing linkages and collaboration between teams and individual team members;
• To clarify the objectives and components for the designs of the new curricula, at both programme and sub-programme (course/module) level;
• To support the development of outcomes-driven curricula design, including integration of soft-skills and mainstreaming of gender in both teaching practices and course content

The workshop began with a reflection on the recently concluded sector needs assessments that each partner university undertook. These highlighted, amongst other key findings, the crucial gaps in soft skills and the need to produce ‘workplace-ready’ graduates – reinforcing that these should be a key focus of new curricula.

Having identified the core skills needs, the next day and a half of the workshop addressed the process of defining learning outcomes, and developing assessment tasks and learning activities aligned to these. Under the excellent guidance of education specialists Dr Mary Omingo and Shanali Govender, partners worked in their teams to develop concise and precise learning outcomes for both ‘hard skills’ (the ability to carry out specific tasks that require specialist knowledge, e.g. engineering design) and ‘soft skills’ (transferable skills required in the workplace, irrespective of the specific role, e.g. communication).

From there, teams began developing summative assessment plans at course-level and day 2 concluded with team members beginning to plan and conceptualise the teaching and learning activities of particular courses.

Day 3 began with a presentation and focus group session on what a gender-inclusive and responsive curriculum might look like. The session also surfaced partner team members’ own experiences and understandings of gender, and some of the approaches already being taken towards gender sensitisation and transformative teaching methods.

The workshop concluded with plenary and team discussions on potential funding opportunities and on business and sustainability planning for the new curricula, reflecting a fundamental objective of the TEA-LP for partners’ new programmes to run sustainably into the future.

Evaluative feedback from workshop participants was overwhelmingly positive, with nearly all respondents indicating they felt the workshop achieved all its key objectives and provided an enriching and engaging experience. We would like to thank all participants for a fulfilling and rewarding week in Addis Ababa.