The term “Summer School” has a bad reputation thanks to its use in American media where it is seen as a punishment for students who didn’t perform well, but for decades the University of Cape Town (UCT) has co-opted the term for optional, open extramural studies which take place in the beginning of the year.
UCT Summer School 2022 will take place between 10th and 29th January 2022 and Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, Vice-Chancellor of UCT, has highlighted next year’s theme of “Education Everywhere”.
“Its wide range of extramural courses help to illustrate the Summer School theme: ‘Education is Everywhere’. By integrating with the Development and Alumni Department and migrating our course content to digital platforms, UCT Summer School now reaches a more diverse community of alumni and friends around the world, including via livestreaming into resource-poor communities. In this way, the 72-year-old UCT Summer School tradition remains young at heart and agile,” Phakeng writes.
By having part of Summer School online (there are also in-person courses) the programme is open up not just to more of South Africa, but also everyone in the world.
Apparently more than one hundred short courses will be available covering just about every subject you can imagine from STEM to languages to medicine and more. If you’re an academic, or just someone with an interest in some learning topics, there seems to be a course for you.
Phakeng makes note of several features of UCT Summer School which will be new for 2022:
- isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Afrikaaps language courses
- courses that earn Continuing Professional Development points
- courses that can be viewed across the world, at times preferred by participants
- access to university learning for resource-poor communities, linked to certificates of attendance
- courses clustered in an innovative manner for ease of choice
- the purchase of books related to online courses via a direct link from the website
- a digital brochure and automated booking system that takes participants seamlessly to the UCT Summer School website and booking site for each selected course
- pictograms and training videos, to support access to the Microsoft Teams platform
- early bird discounts for alumni and members of UCT’s Legacy Society
- key opportunities for sponsorship, to align like-minded corporate entities with the university’s objectives and interests.
For those who would like to attend UCT Summer School 2022 the official main page for the programme can be found here. This page contains dozens of links on the left side of the page that will connect you to further details, an F&Q section, the booking process and more.
A brochure is also available as a PDF here. At 115 pages it’s a rather lengthy read but, thankfully, it has fully searchable text which means readers can pinpoint sections or keywords they’re interested in reading about.
The brochure points out that the cost of lectures is R75 each when taken online and R110 in-person. Those outside of the African continent will be charged slightly more at R94 per online lecture.
Early bird discounts, donations and gifting of courses can all be found on page seven of said brochure.
