Professor Fred Cawood has been elevated to head of the School of Mining Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.

He replaces Professor Huw Phillips, who stepped down at the end of last year. However, he will continue his association with the school as professor.

Meanwhile, the school’s teaching and research staff has been boosted following the engagement of three high-powered personalities, namely Professor Nielan van der Merwe, Professor May Hermanus and Dirk Bakker.

A former head of the school, Van der Merwe has assumed the centennial chair of rock engineering and takes over from Professor Dick Stacey as the resident rock engineering specialist. Stacey stays on as a visiting professor, supervising research and lecturing on the postgraduate part of the mining programme.

Hermanus and Bakker are both former chief inspectors of mines. Hermanus currently leads the Centre for Sustainability in the Minerals Industry (CSMI), which is making a significant impact on the minerals industry through its suite of courses at both certificate and postgraduate levels.

The CSMI’s postgraduate courses on sustainability and mine health and safety feed into the school’s graduate diploma programme, while Bakker also lectures on the undergraduate programme.

Cawood tells Mining Weekly that the total student population at the Wits School of Mining Engineering – South Africa’s oldest school of mining – has increased by 120% since 1999, while the number of staff has increased by only 44%, resulting in a significant increase in lecturers’ workloads.

He adds that the school needs to look at ways of attracting good teaching and research staff and then retaining them.

Cawood says that, while the lecturing responsibilities of senior lecturers and professors focus on later years of study, first-year students have regular exposure to them as they also have some lecturing responsibilities at first-year level.

He hopes that the knowledge and experience gained from the senior lecturers and professors will inspire students and ultimately improve the pass rates in all years of study, especially at first-year level. Cawood notes that the pass rate of first-year students is “unacceptably low”.

“Of the 222 students who registered as first-years at the beginning of 2009, only 75 students passed all their subjects. This is problematic.”

Cawood says that there is a significant gap between the knowledge of learners coming out of the secondary school system and the knowledge expected of students coming into the university system. This was particularly evident in first-year students in 2009, who were also the first products of outcomes-based education (OBE).

The 2008 matriculants were the first to obtain the OBE senior certificate.

Cawood points out that the student base of the mining engi-neering programmes is largely made up of students from schools in rural areas, and how the OBE methodology is applied in rural South Africa, therefore, has a bearing on the quality of students enrolling for the programmes.

Schools in the rural areas showed a poor pass rate at the end of last year, which led to questions being asked about teaching standards in these areas.
A traditional way of assisting students in maths and science to the level required at tertiary levels was through a bridging course, which has fallen away, says Cawood.

He says that a significant problem in the past was the marketing of mining as an attractive career option. With fears that resources were dwindling, students turned to what they perceived as more sustainable careers. Cawood’s view is that mining has seen some good times and that “such days are far from over”.

However, “companies need to mine smarter over time and it is up to students graduating from tertiary institutions to come up with innovative ideas to [ensure this happens]”, says Cawood.

In an effort to accommodate this need, Cawood reports that the school wants to increase its postgraduate research output .

“A lot of students opt to attain a Master of Engineering (MEng) degree as opposed to a Master of Science (MSc) degree through research. “While the MEng degree offers coursework experience, the MSc degree requires students to take a typical mine challenge, study it and come up with a suitable solution. Creating a better balance between research higher degrees and coursework higher degrees is [a] priority for this year.”

To increase research output, Cawood reports that the school will purposely offer fewer MEng “subjects without compromising the need for coursework in our developmental context”.