The Teaching and Learning Development Centre (TLDC) has done it again. The centre has once again had the 2023 Focus Conference proceedings successfully published in the Springer Nature, a German-British publishing company that was created in 2015. It is the publisher of the world’s most influential journals and a pioneer in the field of open research. Springer Nature publishes the conference proceedings in the Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, accredited by DHET.
TLDC’s Mashangu Sithole said the publication of the proceedings was a fitting way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the centre and the conference, which started as a colloquium. It shows that the conference has matured into a respected forum for disseminating high-quality research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).
Sithole said that given that 2023 marks the 10th anniversary of both the TLDC and Focus Conference, the publication of this year’s conference proceedings with Atlantis Press was a significant achievement for the centre. “Ten years ago, I never imagined we would reach this stage of the development of the conference so soon. We have taken the conference to the next level; gone are the days when it was just about PowerPoint presentations and tea,” Sithole said.
Sithole also said that the partnership with Atlantis Press reinforces their commitment to elevating the visibility and impact of their scholarly work on the SoTL. “What pleases us most in this year’s proceedings is the high number of MUT contributors, a significant increase from last year. My sincere gratitude also goes to the editorial team and the reviewers who worked tirelessly to publish the proceedings,” he said.
The 10th anniversary of the conference was also marked by a significant increase in the number of external delegates, a considerable proportion of which were new delegates, including one from Canada. According to Sithole, the spin-offs showed that the conference continues to attract external scholars. The centre received 150 abstracts, from which 55 full papers were submitted, and 33 high-quality papers were accepted and published.