Agroundswell of teenage energy surges through the hall. At Cida City Campus, in Johannesburg's inner city, several hundred first-year students - men on one side, women on the other - cluster round tables to watch a televised lecture on a monitor.
This is the sight that greets visitors to SA's newest tertiary institution.
The politicians, educationists, developmentalists, management practitioners and celebrities who come to see this experiment in low-cost mass education are overwhelmed by the challenge facing educators. And they are proportionately impressed by the way the challenge has been met.
The students are fresh out of a school system that has not yet recovered from apartheid's 40-year assault on black education. Though they were near the top of their classes in their matric year, they left school poorly equipped for the workplace in the 21st century.
But they are rapidly overcoming the handicaps.
"Whatever the lecture, the most important thing students learn each day is how to learn, and how to engage," says Cida CE Taddy Blecher.
He and his colleagues, Conrad Mhlongo, Richard Peycke and Mburu Gitonga, have a system that delivers five-star results: the record shows pass rates for weekly tests average over 70%.
Jackie Lord, formerly a human resources consultant to business, now Cida education co-ordinator for first-year students, says nurturing is backed up by a rigorous study schedule for a bachelor of business administration degree.
To overcome the potential barriers created by the process of getting large quantities of information to large numbers of students through a television monitor, there is always a "human interface" between student and technology. Facilitators are the interface.
"Technology is very important. However, for students to grow they need a nurturing environment that cares and provides constant constructive feedback," says Lord.
"The Cida Facilitated Development Plan does this by creating a series of class areas on each floor. There are 11 per floor. And each one has about 35 students and one facilitator who is assigned to that class for the entire year.
"The facilitators' role is to get to know the students, help them develop leadership in their syndicates and integrate the knowledge being put across by the subject matter experts.
"In many universities and school systems, the classroom is lecturer-centred. Our education floors are learner-centred. We place great emphasis on how the subject matter experts put knowledge across, the need to break down material into concepts and then do some kind of exercises which the students need to do in order to integrate that knowledge at a higher level," says Lord.
"At Cida, we don't believe the intellectual understanding of knowledge is enough. The facilitators ensure that the exercises provided by the subject matter expert run smoothly. A two-hour session might be broken down into overview, concept one, integration exercise; concept two, integration exercise; concept three, integration exercise. It's a case of learner learning rather than teacher teaching.
"This is known as action learning which is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. For instance, Cambridge University has switched to this style of learning. Action learning is about exactly that - action," says Lord.
"The learner is involved, engaged, thinking, discussing, debating, researching, communicating. Each and every day, the student has learnt something.
"During the facilitated exercises the lecturer moves around to check learning is taking place as it should be."
In addition to obtaining a degree, a Cida student will eventually have the opportunity to sit a range of professional examinations set by the SA Institute of Management, the SA Institute of Chartered Accountants, the Certified Associate of the Institute of Bankers in SA, the SA Institute of Financial Markets and Pastel Bookkeeping, among others.
