Keeping the attention of several hundred students in two different halls through a public announcement system and television monitors, takes planning and technical skill.
Cida has established a format for a class session. Llewellyn Bricknell, who co-ordinates the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)'s accounting programme for Cida, has adapted the Cida lecture format. PwC assigns three people each week as lecturers, while most sessions only have one.
"We have designed the course in one-week modules, usually in 10-week blocks. At the end of each week, one team hands over to the team assigned for the following week. These meetings form the basis of our knowledge management," says Bricknell.
"Each team is responsible for achieving the module outcome. How they do it is left to them ," says Bricknell.
"The lecturer has to focus on his or her role and accept that he or she is only one part of a team," he says. "You need to give students a solid theoretical framework and then have the confidence to let the facilitators and students take over and apply Cida's action learning approach."
There are 22 facilitators for the first-year students. They are BCom graduates who have been trained for their facilitating jobs by human development professionals at Cida. One facilitator is responsible for five to six groups (syndicates), each with five to seven students.
Students are not passive participants in the process. They work in syndicates, solving the problems put to them by facilitators.
Feedback to students is continuous and immediate. "Each Friday morning students write tests," says Jackie Lord, first-year educational co-ordinator.
"Facilitators mark them on Friday afternoon and I collate the marks on Saturday. By Monday, the results can be read out to the school.
"Students love the fact that at 9.05 every Monday morning they will hear their test results. All the floors are opened up to the public announcement system, so students throughout the building hear the results. We announce who did well, who got distinctions and what the average pass rate was."
Results are equally important to the staff. "For Cida, the weekly pass rate is like a business's profit and loss account," says Lord. "They tell us what is happening in the classroom."
The teaching system Cida applies is known as "action learning". It requires students to read, think, reflect, listen, debate, discuss, present, watch, talk and write. It has been adapted to Cida's needs by Lord and Blecher who have increased the action dimension. The Extranet programme (see page 22), for instance, benefits the communities for whom the students give workshops, but it is also a valuable experience for students, who gain enormously from it.
"Once you have taught a subject you have really made it your own," says Lord. Like most of what happens at Cida, each lesson has potentially exponential effects.
