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Newcomer focuses on service-delivery
Ms Christa North, newly appointed Executive Advisor: Planning and Special Projects in the office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching-Learning at the Institutional Office of the North-West University, is a woman of many talents.
With mainly the University of Pretoria as her alma mater, her variety of qualifications includes two BA degrees, a Higher Education Diploma (Unisa), an honours degree in Information Science and a master's degree in Publishing.
Her career also speaks of versatility. She worked in the publishing industry for many years, taught at the University of Pretoria (UP), and worked as accreditation manager at the company known as Continuous Education at UP (CE at UP).
Next she worked in the Quality Unit of the UP, the last number of years as head. She was also Acting Director: Accreditation of the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) of the Council on Higher Education (CHE) for a number of years.
Christa, who joined the NWU on 1 January 2013, says she had always believed the NWU to be a credible, well-managed university.
“The people are warm and friendly. We immediately felt at home at the University and in Potchefstroom.”
She says teaching-learning is already on a good trajectory at the NWU. “Further refinement is of course always possible, but the objective must remain to make support to academics meaningful, and to limit bureaucracy to the absolute minimum.”
One of the greatest immediate challenges in her opinion is to help streamline the internal and external approval processes for new academic programmes. She will also be involved with policy development for short courses.
