Dr Samuels regards this award as an acknowledgment of the international education work that has been done at DUT as well as his own contribution. He sees it as a motivation for him to continue making a difference in the world, first amongst DUT students and staff, linking them up with the rest of the world. He has accepted the award with deep humility, acknowledging the different teams he has worked with at DUT, as well as the different organisations in South Africa and abroad.
He believes he would not have achieved this award without working collaboratively, being highly motivated by the African proverb: “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together”.
Commenting on his accolade, Dr Samuels said it came as a surprise to him as he had attended the NAFSA Conference to present two papers not knowing he was going to receive this award at the end of the conference.
“The NAFSA Conference is an event that I normally attend, but I had no idea that I was attending to receive my award. I thought I was invited to the dinner because I was one of the speakers at the conference. Strangely enough they sent a second request for me to confirm my attendance, I didn’t realise that there were people put in charge to get me into the event on time. At the dinner they announced that they will be giving out awards and when it came to my award they started reading out a citation, which I didn’t realise was mine. I turned to the person next to me to say this person has done similar to me in my career, until it became impossible not to know it was me,” shared Dr Samuels.
He indicated that it turned out to be a pleasant surprise to be given this award. He has served in a number of different associations but the bulk of his international education work has been at DUT for the past 15 years.
“My work is about making international education at DUT inclusive, to look beyond just the few that are able to travel internationally. I have done a lot of work on the internationalisation of the curriculum and on Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). Due to these innovative and creative approaches to internationalisation, our international education has reached far more of our students and our staff. It has made it far more inclusive and it has become more impactful in the curriculum. We are trying to ensure that by 2030, everybody at DUT has an international experience, even though not everyone will be able to travel abroad, but everyone will be able to engage internationally in the classroom and beyond.” explained Dr Samuels.
He shared that has he been the President of the International Education Association of South Africa for two terms, where he has done a lot in driving international education nationally as well, to give South African students an opportunity to have an international experience. Through scholarships such as Abe Bailey and Erasmus, many students at DUT have had an international experience. He proudly shared that DUT students have been successful 14 times in the last 15 years in the prestigious Abe Bailey Scholarship.
In addition, Dr Samuels has done a lot of work in the virtual space to promote international virtual exchange and Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL). He also serves as the President of the International Virtual Exchange Consortium, where DUT plays a leading role. DUT staff have been trained on how to engage with international partners and to conduct collaboration online teaching in their classrooms.
“We have had over 150 of these COIL projects going on at DUT, across our six faculties in partnering across six continents. In 2020 we won a bid to be the consultants to the Association of Commonwealth Universities and we developed a toolkit for virtual exchange and COIL. This is toolkit that is now being used by 600 member universities of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. In 2021, DUT won the AIEA Award for excellence and innovation in internationalisation because of the type of innovative internationalisation we are doing at this university. Our research at DUT has also become far more internationalised, we are collaborating with partners around the world,” added Dr Samuels, who indicated that there was still a lot more they intend to do to put DUT on the international map.
His desire is for his team’s work to contribute to DUT’s ENVISION2030 strategy, where they showcase creativity in their work and use internationalisation to drive innovation in the curriculum and innovation in research for internationalisation to be a distinctive form of education.
He believes this will help DUT to be an engaged university in the regional, national and international contexts and contribute to shaping adaptive graduates who are resilient and agile, contributing to an ever changing inter-connected world.
Pictured: Dr Lavern Samuels receiving his BMI/Times Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award.
Simangele Zuma
