From a rusty Beetle to UCT’s 2030 Teaching blueprint

For the past five years, Professor Brandon Collier-Reed has been rebuilding a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle with his son.

There is little about the project that has been quick. The car was stripped down, its parts dismantled, rebuilt and reassembled. Rust had to be removed. Components had to be repaired or replaced. Some pieces had to be made to work with others before the vehicle could begin to resemble the car it was meant to become.

Now, after years of painstaking work, the green Beetle is almost ready for the road.

For Professor Collier-Reed, the timing is striking.

As the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) deputy vice-chancellor (DVC) for Teaching and Learning settles into his second year in office, another diligent rebuild is also approaching a critical stage: the university’s Teaching and Learning Strategy 2030.

Like the Beetle, the strategy has not been built by one person working alone. It has emerged from the contributions of faculties, students and members of the wider university community, with different parts needing to fit together before the institution can move forward.

“The car itself has been built together collaboratively. My son and I working together to create this thing which is going to sort of come to fruition,” he told UCT News in a one-on-one interview.

“Similarly with the Teaching and Learning Strategy, it’s had many people who have worked together to come to this stage.”

“The exciting part is still to come. Now we’re in a position as an institution to have agreed on what the teaching and learning strategy for the university is. And then the exciting work begins.”

The metaphor is more than a charming personal anecdote. It captures how Collier-Reed views his first 19 months in one of UCT’s most important portfolios – and how he sees the years ahead.

The strategy, which is due to go before UCT’s Senate in September, is intended to provide the university with a common framework for teaching and learning through to 2030. But Collier-Reed is clear that Senate approval will not mark the end of the project.

It will mark the beginning of a road test.

“The exciting part is still to come,” he said. “Now we’re in a position as an institution to have agreed on what the teaching and learning strategy for the university is. And then the exciting work begins.”

That work will involve developing an implementation plan, as well as mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating whether the strategy is producing the changes it promises.

Collier-Reed is particularly determined that it should not become another university document that generates enthusiasm before quietly finding its way onto a shelf.

“My sincere intention is that this strategy is not just on a shelf, but it drives implementation, and it drives innovation and change at the University of Cape Town.”

Building together, not working in silos

The strategy’s architecture reflects Collier-Reed’s collaborative approach.

Rather than organising its priorities into conventional “pillars”, the strategy uses six strategic “strands”. The distinction is deliberate. Pillars, he argues, can imply that priorities stand separately from one another. Strands, by contrast, can be woven together.

“These six strands all work together, and all interact with each other,” he said. “They get woven together, and then they hold the academic project.”

The philosophy echoes the way he approached his role after taking office in January 2025.

One of his earliest lessons was that the DVC: Teaching and Learning cannot simply dictate how faculties should educate their students.

UCT’s faculties already have deep expertise in their disciplines and have been working through major questions around curriculum, decolonisation and student success.

“The most impact I can have is through helping and supporting the faculties to do the job that they are really good at doing, and that is educating their students,” he said.

“My role becomes one of creating the environment to enable them to do the good work that they are doing.”

That makes the strategy less a blueprint imposed from the top and more a framework intended to help different parts of the university work in concert.

One of its intended outcomes is a more coherent student journey.

Admissions, teaching, student wellbeing and other services may each function effectively, Collier-Reed said, but students can experience them as disconnected pieces.

The answer, he explained, lies in getting the different parts of the university to work together.

“The Teaching and Learning Strategy is a strategy of teaching and learning for the University of Cape Town, not for my portfolio.”

Rebuilding education in the age of AI

If the strategy is a rebuild, the rise of generative artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the vehicle UCT is trying to build.

One of Collier-Reed’s first major decisions as DVC was to switch off Turnitin’s AI detection feature after concerns about the reliability of AI detectors and the possibility of students being wrongly accused of academic dishonesty.

The decision was controversial, but it reflected a broader question that has since become even more urgent: how does a university assess learning when technologies such as ChatGPT can transform the way students write, research and complete assignments?

Collier-Reed believes AI has changed not only student behaviour, but also the work of academics – from preparing teaching material to designing assessments and marking.

UCT therefore faces the challenge of ensuring that technology enhances education without undermining the competencies graduates need to develop.

“Technology is not neutral,” he said, arguing that the university needs to take a cautious approach to AI while remaining open to its potential benefits.

For Collier-Reed, the goal is not to turn back the clock but to rethink what happens in the classroom.

The same approach informs his interest in multilingualism and digital learning. He sees opportunities to use UCT’s linguistic diversity more creatively in teaching, while also retaining lessons from the rapid expansion of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking the African classroom to the world

Those questions will also feature prominently when UCT hosts the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit in September – the first time the summit will be held in Africa.

For Collier-Reed, the event is an opportunity to put UCT’s experience of teaching in a diverse, unequal and resource-constrained environment into a global conversation.

He will speak in the “People and Pedagogy” stream on inclusive education and innovation in contexts of disruption and inequality.

He hopes to demonstrate that meaningful improvements in student success do not always depend on having unlimited resources but can come from carefully targeted changes to curriculum and pedagogy.

“It’s not about being north or south,” he said. “It’s about the people involved, it’s about the commitment you have to the task, and it’s about how you go about leveraging the resources you have to make meaningful impact in our students’ lives.”

That may ultimately be the philosophy underpinning both of Collier-Reed’s long-running projects.

A car does not become roadworthy because one component works. Every part has to connect, function and withstand the test of the road. Likewise, a teaching and learning strategy cannot transform a university simply because it has been approved. Its success will depend on whether the different parts of UCT can work together to turn its ambitions into everyday experiences for students and academics.

For Collier-Reed, the Beetle is almost ready. The strategy is almost ready, too. But neither is finished.

“I’m one and a half years into my role as DVC. It’s only just the beginning.”