Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms of community engagement initiatives in Universities of Technology in South Africa

Abstract

The contemporary higher education institution realizes that the process of accomplishing their vision, mission and objectives involves multi-level interactions with diverse stakeholders within their external environment. Universities and other designations of higher education institutions are no longer walled off from society but required to assume a position of relevance to the society in all of their activities related to creation, transformation, transfer and distribution of knowledge. It is in this context that community engagement has emerged as a vehicle to broaden higher education’s direct participation in society’s development. The main roles of higher education institutions are adjudged to be research, teaching and learning, and community engagement. This study focused on community engagement in higher education in South Africa. The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of community engagement and its institutionalization in universities of technology in South Africa. Furthermore, another central purpose of the study was to examine how community engagement initiatives are currently being monitored and evaluated in universities of technology in South Africa. The choice of universities of technology as the focus of the study was to provide an understanding into the development, growth, direction and activities pertaining to community engagement in this typology of higher education institution, and more importantly, the monitoring and evaluation mechanisms used in the process. Guided by a constructivist paradigm, the research study was undertaken using a qualitative methodology, exploratory and multiple case study design. Purposive sampling was applied to select six universities of technology as case studies for the research. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used to obtain data from key informants in the institutional case studies. Key informants or interviewees were made up of university officials in charge of the institutions’ community engagement portfolio and managers of community engagement projects or initiatives in the institutions. Also, additional data was obtained from university documents. Documentary evidence was critical to this study because university documents supplemented data obtained from the semi-structured interviews. Data analysis was carried out using qualitative thematic content analysis in order to make sense of the qualitative data and make interpretations and inferences. Primary findings from this study showed that the practice of community engagement in universities of technology in South Africa is highly contextual. Each institution undertakes community engagement in their own context and unique positioning influenced by factors such as institutional history, geographical location, institutional definition of community and community engagement, focus area, amongst others. In terms of the particular degree to which community engagement is institutionalized, the study found that community engagement does not receive the same level of emphasis as teaching and learning and research in universities of technology in South Africa. Although organizational structures for the institutionalization of community engagement are in place in most of the universities, the actual practice of community engagement requires improvement in order for it to be deeper in the institutional fabric of the universities of technology. Additional findings indicate that monitoring and evaluation of community engagement initiatives occurs in universities of technology, albeit informally, in most of them with improvised approaches and methodologies which differ among projects and from institution to institution. Hence, monitoring and evaluation is not consistently applied to community engagement projects in the institutions. Such inconsistency was evident in non-enforcement of monitoring and evaluation as a practice in management of community engagement projects, lack of standardized monitoring and evaluation tools in majority of the institutions, and unequal weightings for community engagement in staff performance management. Therefore, the study concludes that monitoring and evaluation of community engagement lacks depth in universities of technology in South Africa. The study’s recommendations were, amongst others, to propose a systems model for the practice of community engagement; a model for the form of community engagement; as well as a model for monitoring and evaluation of community engagement initiatives. The monitoring and evaluation framework emphasizes the integration of community engagement projects into the academic curriculum at every point either through research or through teaching and learning. Universities express community engagement based on their own individual contexts. This research study places institutional context of the university as the platform from and on which the monitoring and evaluation model functions, and uses curriculum integration as the grounding for institutionalization of community engagement in the core of university activities. In addition to providing feedback on project performance, the proposed monitoring and evaluation model focuses on emphasizing engaged scholarship in indicators at each level of the model. This contribution to knowledge provides direction on how to put community engagement projects together in a manner that promotes meaningful and practical scholarship.