Mauritius Lecturer training November 2014
The UCT ESEFA project team gave a lecturer training course in “ES Fundamentals with SAP” at the University of Mauritius (UOM) from the 24th to 28th November 2014. In total 11 academics from UOM, which is the piloting ESEFA partner university in Mauritius, as well as 8 lecturers from the University of Technology Mauritius (UTM) - who are keen to join the ESEFA programme at a later stage - attended the training.
The course facilitators were Ms Anjali Ramburn-Gopaul (front row second from left), who is a lecturer in the Department of Information Systems at UCT and one of the ESEFA project curriculum development team, and Mr Graeme Ampeire (front row second from right), ESEFA project technical assistant at UCT.
Academics from different Faculties and Departments participated in the training, these were Business, Management and Finance; Business, Management and Law; Industrial Systems Engineering; Mechanical and Production Engineering; Applied Mathematical Sciences; Business Informatics and Software Engineering and from Computer Science.
Both universities have integrated Enterprise Systems (ES) modules into disciplines such as Engineering, Management and Information Systems. With regards to their ERP competencies, some of the participants had prior consultancy experience while others had extensive teaching exposure.
The course served as a platform for the academics from the two universities to actively engage in pertinent academic and empirical debates whilst sharing their SAP ERP expertise and concerns. The participants unanimously discussed the challenges they faced in terms of incorporating the required practical ERP components to the theoretical underpinnings. They further discussed the increasing demand of SAP ERP skills from industry. The group positioned the course as a valuable way to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and showed a keen interest to integrate the relevant ESEFA modules into their respective existing study programmes.