Student Success

Selfhelp.sun.ac.za ​serves as a centralised platform, consolidating services, resources, and guidance from the Centre for Student Counselling and Development. As the university's first line of assistance, the web application provides invaluable support and advice on a myriad of topics crucial to student success, including adjustment to university life, career guidance, mental health, food security, and disability assistance.
 

The SUNSuccess project has the overarching aim to implement a student support solution with the following objectives:

• Deliver automated workflows for support and intervention tracking.
• Diagnose and communicate opportunities for academic and personal growth (e.g. early alerts and flags).
• Monitor and measure the impact of success-enhancing interventions on academic performance, experience and personal-social development.
• Deliver an intelligent and customised view of data for both students and academic support staff.
   

The project is being developed as a module of SUNStudent with roll-out in 2025. Please contact Christina Harvett ([email protected]) for any enquiries.​​​

Absolutely. Our Writing Lab is a safe space where you can connect with a writing consultant about your academic writing. You may visit us as many times as you like, and our service is free. We also offer academic literacies and professional communication modules in most faculties, which would help students further to learn to speak 'university' and prepare them to communicate in a professional manner.

Yes, we would love to! Our Reading Lab offers you many ways to enhance your reading skills, from free short workshops to using ReadTheory, which provides online reading comprehension practice to students of all levels. We also work together with some faculties to have our service included in some courses. Some of these services are free, too.

The Language Centre's Writing Lab workshops tackle a wide range of topics including internal organisation, coherence, cohesion, style, external structure, editing, audience, purpose of scientific writing, research topics, problem statements and hypotheses. We also look at project structure, paragraphing and argumentation, scientific writing style, referencing and more. Our Writing Lab workshops are aimed at master's and doctoral students in various fields of study and are geared towards helping postgraduates to succeed. Learn more here.

If you feel that your students could benefit from a Writing Lab writing skills workshop, the Language Centre can present tailor-made courses or workshops to specific departments, based on your unique needs. We will plan, develop and present these in collaboration with the lecturers from the various departments. To organise a tailor-made workshop for your students, contact Selene Delport.

Most faculties have in-house training opportunities for peer-to-peer facilitators (tutors). You can contact your Vice-Dean: Teaching and Learning for more information. SU also offers an institutional Peer Facilitation Training Short Course. For more information, please visit the webpage or contact Sim Ntwasa ([email protected])

The Regulations for peer-to-peer learning support offer guidelines that you can consult; please see Point 6.1: Designations and roles. You can also contact Sim Ntwasa ([email protected]) for more information. 

Please visit the CTL website to find the Regulations for peer-to-peer learning.

For more information, please visit the webpage or contact Sim Ntwasa ([email protected])

ATTRIBUTION: Image courtesy of Stellenbosch University