Amathuba New Banner 2024

 

Introduction to Amathuba

Amathuba is the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) digital learning platform, powered by D2L Brightspace. The name Amathuba means “opportunities” in isiXhosa, reflecting its role in opening up opportunities for teaching, learning, and collaboration. It serves as UCT’s primary learning management system (LMS), replacing the previous system, Amathuba. Amathuba provides a modern, flexible, and accessible environment that supports students and staff in managing coursework, assessments, and communication effectively. Its design emphasises inclusivity, reliability, and seamless integration with other learning and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams.

Key Features of Amathuba

  • User-friendly content creation – Drag-and-drop tools and templates for building engaging courses with text, multimedia, and interactive activities.
  • Assessment and grading tools – Online assignments, quizzes, rubrics, and flexible grading schemes with space for detailed feedback.
  • Learning analytics – Dashboards and reports to track student progress, identify challenges, and improve teaching strategies.
  • Intelligent agents – Automated reminders and notifications that keep students on track.
  • Mobile learning support – Accessible on any device, with the Brightspace Pulse app offering offline access, task notifications, and grade updates.
  • Collaboration integration – Seamless links to Microsoft Teams for live classes, discussions, and group work.
  • High availability and security – Cloud-hosted on Amazon Web Services with 99.99% uptime for reliability.
  • Accessibility and inclusivity – Designed to support diverse learners with responsive layouts and compliance with accessibility standards.
  • Advanced authoring and performance tools – Tools like Creator+ for interactive content and Performance+ for advanced learning insights.

Course Site Types

Amathuba provides different types of sites to support both teaching and non-teaching purposes:

  1. Course Sites – Standard sites for teaching and learning across all UCT courses, including undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
  2. Converted / Reference Sites – Sites created when content is migrated from Amathuba; used as reference copies from which course content can be moved into live sites.
  3. Non-teaching / Community Sites – Used by faculties, departments, residences, student organisations, and support units for communication, orientation, and information sharing.
  4. Orientation and Faculty Sites – Designed for student onboarding and dissemination of faculty-level information, such as undergraduate guides or announcements.
  5. Short Course Sites – Managed through Course Merchant for continuing education, professional development, and short learning programmes.
  6. Sandbox / Test Sites – Practice spaces for lecturers, tutors, or administrators to experiment and develop materials without affecting live courses.

The use of Amathuba by Health Sciences’ staff and students continues to increase with almost 200 online course related sites in use.

Online Examinations

 

EDUTech is involved in 80% of the online assessments run in the faculty. This includes setting up the assessments, publishing them and being on hand when the students write. In some cases, educators opted to upload their examinations personally. It is recommended that an EDUTech member check the accuracy of the settings, export/import to assessment sites or make corrections to question types and images. In certain instances, exporting and importing examinations required extensive correcting of layout and formatting of questions after being imported into the correct Amathuba sites.  All question types proved to be functioning correctly during the examination.  

The computer labs have installed " Respondus Lockdown Browser, " which should be used for all assessments. This is to increase the security aspect of the evaluations. Other security measures should be upheld, which can be found in the Computer-Based Testing SOP. Remember, computer lab bookings must be done by the course convener of the assessment. 

 

For assistance with Amathuba, contact the Health Sciences Amathuba Helpdesk at edu-helpdesk@uct.ac.za or the CILT helpdesk at  cilt-helpdesk@uct.ac.za.