Internationalisation has become a tune in higher education institutions, and universities across the world are encouraged to incorporate various methods of internationalisation within their scope to reap the benefits of global interconnectedness.

CUT remains connected with the rest of the world in terms of knowledge creation, production and dissemination, and has since made great strides in its partnership with the German universities as part of its internationalisation strategy intended to expose students and academic staff to the globalised world.

CUT celebrates 20 years of successful collaboration with the Aalen University of Applied Sciences from 28-30 September 2022 at Bloemfontein campus and Welkom Campus respectively.  The celebration was hosted under the theme “The future of Universities and the universities of the future.” 

It has been 20 years since the most productive cooperation between CUT and Aalen University of Applied Sciences, even before the change of names of both universities (Technikon Free State and Hoschschule Aalen). The celebration is also to honour the pioneers and founding members of this partnership, and to also share gratitude on the milestones achieved thus far.

Professor Ngowi shared some of the 20- year partnership highlights  with Aalen University  including regular student and staff mobility across all four CUT faculties that exposed the university to a globalised world, collaboration on research publications  and books, the VALU-E entrepreneurial board games, Vredefort Dome tourism project and the active participation of both universities as a consortium of five years international universities, to develop the state of art short courses on entrepreneurship. “It gives me great pleasure to witness the successes that resulted from a long-sustained partnership between us.  We are proud to be associated with Aalen university. It is evident that our relationship has been built on a solid foundation as we have made some remarkable progress in our collaboration from when it started to date. We will continue working together not only in the areas mentioned but also in the offering of our newly developed structured Masters in Entrepreneurship Development Unit. We will continue to support this healthy and fruitful collaboration with Aalen in the years to come.” said Prof. Ngowi.

Prof. Ulrich Holzbaur from Aalen University of Applied Sciences and one of the founders and pioneers of this partnership, said the collaborations with CUT has added much-desired value that is beneficial to both universities. He also highlighted that over the past 20 years, both CUT and Aalen have exchanged about 135 students. “The CUT -Aalen collaboration has managed to offer our student and staff the added niche to travel intentionally through the Baden Wurttemberg Scholarship program for over 10 years. This means there is more regular mobility of staff and students across all four faculties” he added.

Mr Siphiwe Mkhwanazi, CUT Alumni who was part of the students exchange programme in his years as a student, shared his thoughts on how the CUT-Aalen university collaboration changed his perspective about life, culture, and how other people from different poles of the world do things. He said, “the relationship between Aalen and CUT University changed my perception about a lot of things and I wish more students can get the chance to explore and learn more about life outside their borders, learn different ideologies and expand their horizons to become better critical thinkers and problem solvers.” 

Prof. Desere Kokt and professor Laetus Lategan were given a moment to briefly talk about their experience in the 20-year collaboration between the two universities and they both shared the same sentiments on a strong partnership between the two and the value of benefit thereof.

Both parties wished to work together for the next coming 20 years and continue to embed the principles of comprehensive internationalization.

Captions

1: Mr Steffen Schwarzer, Prof. Laetus Lategan, Prof. Alfred Ngowi, Prof. Desere Kokt, Ms Refilwe Moleyane and Prof. Ulrich Holzbaur.

2: Mr Siphiwe Mkhwanazi, CUT Alumni who was part of the students exchange program.

Uploaded: 30 September 2022