Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology proved that distance is not a barrier for knowledge sharing when they held their 2^nd annual interactive lecture between ULM University on 04 May 2016. Information Technology as a powerful tool for teaching and learning has once again broke all barriers to bridge the gap of distance.

The session is a continuation of an academic information exchange programme aimed at encouraging closer co-operation between the two universities. The technological interaction follows the overwhelming success of the first such venture last year, which invoked keen interest among students and the academic staff at both campuses. The idea of the lecture is to allow students from both campuses an opportunity to give a lecture on the scope of their syllabus in the common subject, Control Systems 3. Control systems 3 is an exit level subject offered in the National Diploma program at both universities and combines the knowledge from various other subjects they have learned previously, namely Mathematics , Electronics and Electrical Engineering which means that very few students gets the chance to sit for class from both universities. In 2015, only 15 students participated from CUT but this year, the class strength has increased to 22 students registered for the module. To bring fun, challenge, and competitiveness to this project, students were split into five groups under the supervision of Mr Rangith Baby Kuriakose, lecturer in Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering.

The assessment was done by a team from Opti-num solutions led by Mr R Morobi. Opti-num solutions have provided CUT with a TAH licence for MATLAB, the main software used in academia and industry for teaching and simulating Control systems. It is important to mention that CUT is one of the only recipients of the TAH licence in Africa and Opti-num solutions have the distributing authority for Sub-Saharan Africa. The team from ULM University led by Prof. Walter Commerell, kept up the quality of work by designing a brightness regulation control system and explained the different techniques used in optimizing the design for external disturbances. ULM presentation was done by Ms Sarah Winkler and Ms Marina Ott. The winning group designed a temperature-controlled fridge using MATLAB and Arduino, which the faculty of health at CUT will be using in their study for optimizing temperature in beverage manufacture. The winning group was awarded with official Arduino kits and official MATLAB t-shirts by Opti-num solutions. All participants alluded that there were visible improvements on both the academic and communication front. Mr Paul Victor (Audio-visual support officer at CUT) also played a role in ensuring that the teams do not encounter technical glitches during the video conference. 

Images 

1: CUT presenters from left:  Dr K Kusakana, acting Head of the Department; Mr RB Kuriakose, Mbuyisa SL,  JJ Viera,  DJ van Wyk, Ntuli SW and Prof. Herman Vermaak, Professor in Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering.