University of South Africa

About: University of South Africa is a education organization based out in Pretoria, South Africa. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Context (language use) & Population. The organization has 8478 authors who have published 19960 publications receiving 237688 citations. The organization is also known as: Unisa.

African women in leadership: Current knowledge and a framework for future studies

Abstract: While the empirical literature on leadership and management in Africa is sparse, the literature on African women in leadership is even sparser. This article offers a critical examination of the current state of knowledge on African women in leadership and management. It draws from an extensive review of existing published research to summarise what has been studied and is currently known about their status, leadership styles, and the influence of gender on their experiences as leaders and managers. Based on this review, an integrative framework, drawing from African feminism and postcolonial theory, is proposed to advance the study of African women in leadership and management.

Employee Retention Factors For South African Higher Education Institutions: A Case Study

Abstract: The success of the most competitive companies throughout the world, including higher education institutions, lies in their highly skilled employees on which these institutions spend millions to retain. Literature reveals the cost of losing best employees to be enormous – beyond monetary quantification. Also worth noting is that the loss of one competent employee to a competitor institution strengthens the competitor’s advantage. This case study analysed human resources turnover data, and interviewed academic managers and employees in order to examine the possible employee retention factors for a higher education institution in South Africa. The findings reveal different institutional interests between institutional managers and employees. The former are concerned more about profits, business sustenance and justification for spending, while the latter are driven by introverted interests such as development, monetary rewards and personal fulfilment.

Human Resource Management in Education

Abstract: This new edition follows the second edition of 2006. In this revised edition, we introduce more educational policies that have numerous implications for educational managers. These policies require educational managers to create a conducive environment where firm collegial relationships are established for effective teaching and learning. At the core of these policy initiatives is a thrust towards democratisation of the principles by which schools are governed and managed. These processes and structures involve institutional autonomy, school-based management, self-management, site-based management and participative decision-making. Educational managers require and deserve all the help available to turn the avalanche of reforms into workable practices. Human Resources Management in Education seeks to contribute helpful advice and assistance to educational managers to address numerous management problems and challenges. The topics covered include resourcing and development (staffing, induction, professional development and staff appraisal), empowering people (staff motivation, effective communication, conflict management and stress management) and stimulating individual and team performance (self-management, team management and leadership). Human Resources Management in Education is intended to guide educational managers through the main issues, not simply in problem-solving, but also in contextualisation. Furthermore, the third edition of Human Resources Management in Education aims to facilitate acquisition of knowledge, skills and attitudes in human resource management. Prof GM Steyn and Prof EJ van Niekerk's involvement in formal courses on education management have brought them in direct contact with the practical problems that educational managers experience in the school setting. They have both published a substantial number of articles and chapters in books on various educational topics.

Student privacy self-management: implications for learning analytics

Abstract: Optimizing the harvesting and analysis of student data promises to clear the fog surrounding the key drivers of student success and retention, and provide potential for improved student success. At the same time, concerns are increasingly voiced around the extent to which individuals are routinely and progressively tracked as they engage online. The Internet, the very thing that promised to open up possibilities and to break down communication barriers, now threatens to narrow it again through the panopticon of mass surveillance. Within higher education, our assumptions and understanding of issues surrounding student attitudes to privacy are influenced both by the apparent ease with which the public appear to share the detail of their lives and our paternalistic institutional cultures. As such, it can be easy to allow our enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by learning analytics to outweigh consideration of issues of privacy. This paper explores issues around consent and the seemingly simple choice to allow students to opt-in or opt-out of having their data tracked. We consider how 3 providers of massive open online courses (MOOCs) inform users of how their data is used, and discuss how higher education institutions can work toward an approach which engages and more fully informs students of the implications of learning analytics on their personal data.

The spatial scaling of habitat selection by African elephants.

Abstract: 1. Understanding and accurately predicting the spatial patterns of habitat use by organisms is important for ecological research, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management. However, this understanding is complicated by the effects of spatial scale, because the scale of analysis affects the quantification of species-environment relationships. 2. We therefore assessed the influence of environmental context (i.e. the characteristics of the landscape surrounding a site), varied over a large range of scales (i.e. ambit radii around focal sites), on the analysis and prediction of habitat selection by African elephants in Kruger National Park, South Africa. 3. We focused on the spatial scaling of the elephants' response to their main resources, forage and water, and found that the quantification of habitat selection strongly depended on the scales at which environmental context was considered. Moreover, the inclusion of environmental context at characteristic scales (i.e. those at which habitat selectivity was maximized) increased the predictive capacity of habitat suitability models. 4. The elephants responded to their environment in a scale-dependent and perhaps hierarchical manner, with forage characteristics driving habitat selection at coarse spatial scales, and surface water at fine spatial scales. 5. Furthermore, the elephants exhibited sexual habitat segregation, mainly in relation to vegetation characteristics. Male elephants preferred areas with high tree cover and low herbaceous biomass, whereas this pattern was reversed for female elephants. 6. We show that the spatial distribution of elephants can be better understood and predicted when scale-dependent species-environment relationships are explicitly considered. This demonstrates the importance of considering the influence of spatial scale on the analysis of spatial patterning in ecological phenomena.