The culture of excellent teaching is firmly entrenched at UP across all fields of study. Our committed academics have multiple approaches to teaching to ensure that students with various learning strengths succeed. Good teaching helps students to excel and graduate in the minimum time set out for a degree.

Our degrees are locally accredited and internationally recognised. We have agreements with the relevant legal accreditation bodies worldwide, which means that your qualification will consistently be recognised with UP behind your name. 

Our teaching and learning approach is based on inquiry-based, hybrid, and community-based learning. This means that students can ask questions and do research in their field to learn and discover answers on their own, be taught in a classroom or other formal contact environment but also find additional activities, notes, resources and videos to supplement their classes online; or apply their knowledge in a practical way to help communities around university campuses.

Additional academic development is offered to first-year students to orient them to the range of support services and offerings available institution-wide and within faculties to help students achieve their educational goals. These include tutoring, mentoring and advising services.

TEACH & LEARN The UP Way

The University's approach to learning theory posits that students actively construct their knowledge and understandings, which is best achieved through engagement in class using inquiry-based teaching. A flipped teaching approach, requiring students to prepare before class, allows new teaching to build upon existing knowledge actively. This creates more time in class for inquiry-based activities, such as developing ideas, exploring consequences, justifying solutions, discussions, and problem-solving, while lecturers can focus on complex concepts and problems. The inquiry-based flip approach is applicable across different instructional modalities. 

The University's flipped learning model is divided into three phases of teaching and learning: (a) preparation before class, (b) engagement in class, and (c) consolidation after class.

High-quality instruction requires students to come to class prepared, enabling new teaching to build on existing knowledge. Students can prepare for the class using traditional textbooks, eTextbooks, PDF and Word files, videos or publishers' learning systems. Students' preparedness for each class should be assessed before the class. These assessments provide valuable information to a lecturer that can be used during contact classes to address misconceptions. 

Inquiry-based learning, which involves teaching through questioning rather than telling, allows students to think, communicate and justify their ideas. 

Assignments and assessments after class allow students to consolidate their knowledge and organise it into meaningful hierarchical patterns. This process helps students reinforce their understanding of the material and make connections between different concepts, leading to deeper learning and retention. 

The academic success of students at the University of Pretoria

The University of Pretoria is dedicated to fostering an environment where students can thrive and achieve success. The University is fully committed to providing support and assistance to students and removing obstacles to their success. However, students are also responsible for taking charge of their own success and career development. This includes preparing for the workforce, post-graduate studies, and employment after graduation. The first step towards enhancing student success is offering quality teaching and learning opportunities that enable active and authentic engagement with a particular discipline's knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values. To succeed in the modern workforce, students must possess adaptability, ethics, critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, collaboration, effective communication, and self-directed learning while being interculturally aware. Achieving these qualities requires a high-quality teaching and learning environment with relevant curricula.