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The purpose of this empirical research paper is to investigate the self-perceived role of the community partner of a higher education service-learning and community engagement module.

A qualitative approach was followed by distributing a questionnaire to the community partners of a community engagement module and coding the responses using ATLAS.ti. A total of 36 responses were received from community partners who work with students enrolled in a compulsory undergraduate community-based project module at the University of Pretoria's Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology.

The community partners share a common interest in the students' education. They are experts in their fields and can share their knowledge with the students and the university. Through these partnerships, long-term reciprocal relationships can develop. Community partners can become co-educators and partners in education. The pragmatist representations of community partners can be challenged when they understand their own stakes in service-learning or community engagement projects. This better aids higher education institutes in the management and evaluation of service-learning and community engagement pedagogies and curricula.

Two main limitations underlie this study. Firstly, this research is based on data from one community module at a single university. Although a large number of students are registered in the module, the study would be improved by conducting it at more than one university countrywide. Secondly, the study was performed during the first coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown the country experienced. This was a completely unexpected event for which everyone was totally unprepared. Many of the community partners lacked the resources to receive or respond to an online questionnaire. The nature of the lockdown prevented the researchers from reaching these community partners for a face-to-face interview. The voice of these community partners is, therefore, silent.

The community partners reiterated their need to be seen as equal partners in the module and appreciated being part of a group of non-profit enterprises working together with a university to pursue a set of common goals. However, their status as peers depends on their willingness and ability to contribute sufficiently to the structure and demands of the service-learning module. The community partners who were able and willing to orientate each group of students to their organisation's mission and objectives, and who executed their roles according to the course requirements, experienced the greatest success in terms of project effectiveness and efficiency, and also in terms of future benefits when students returned to volunteer or provide donations. Given time, these community partners grew into an equal partner with the university's stakeholders, where both their own needs and those of the students were met during the various service-learning projects.

Since all respondents in this study are non-profit organisations, the financial assistance and free labour afforded to them by the students are of paramount importance. The community partners also understand the longer-term value implications of successful student projects, as some students return of their free will to volunteer their services when gainfully employed after graduation.

Community engagement projects are rarely investigated from the community partner's point of view. This paper elicited their responses and examined them through the lens of Fraser's theory of social justice (Fraser, 2009).

This chapter is a case study of the Joint Community-based Project (code: JCP) that is presented by the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The JCP module is a macro compulsory undergraduate course. The need to adhere to the University’s strategic social responsiveness goal motivated the integration of community engagement into the Faculty’s undergraduate programme curriculum. The free-standing project-orientated community engagement course requires students to complete at least 40 hours of fieldwork and thereafter reflect on their experiences through various assignments. Since the advent of the module in 2011, an average of 1,700 students have registered for the course annually. Students form, on average, 500 groups and partner with more than 350 different university–community partners annually. The students are required to engage in a community service project to apply their knowledge to uplift the community. They have to address a specific need in a community to benefit that society. The exposure to authentic challenges afforded by means of their projects allows students to increase their awareness of their social responsibility and learn to work in diverse teams and multidisciplinary and multilingual environments and apply various life skills during the execution of the project. During the nationwide lockdown brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, students had to identify alternative ways to assist the communities.

The projects in which the students provided assistance included the following:

• Creating a mobile application (an app) for a project with the homeless community.

• Assisting teachers with teaching online.

• Developing various websites to assist learners with Mathematics.

• Teaching learners Mathematics via WhatsApp.

• Developing educational videos.

• Making masks for clinics and old age homes.

• Developing educational resources for disadvantaged pre-schools.

Creating a mobile application (an app) for a project with the homeless community.

Assisting teachers with teaching online.

Developing various websites to assist learners with Mathematics.

Teaching learners Mathematics via WhatsApp.

Developing educational videos.

Making masks for clinics and old age homes.

Developing educational resources for disadvantaged pre-schools.

The lecturer and the students had to adapt to the challenges of working on community projects off-site. The chapter will discuss the various students’ projects and the lessons the students and course coordinator learnt on changing the module’s format in a time of crisis.

The case study in this chapter is the Joint Community-based Project (code: JCP), a compulsory macro undergraduate course that is offered by the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The course was introduced to teach students the soft skills they will need as graduates and make them aware of their social responsibility. More than 1,600 students register for the course annually. Generally, students work in 450 groups each year to help more than 250 community partners. The course, which has received recognition at institutional, national and international levels, requires students to work in a community for at least 40 hours, after which they reflect on their learning experience through a report, presentation and YouTube video. The identification and selection process of community partners is based on contextual criteria, while new cohorts of students can recommend new community partners each year. Community partners’ tasks include project coordination and student assessment based on the course’s assessment criteria. This chapter discusses how community partners are identified, coordinated and sustained within a macro community service course. It also provides a conceptual framework to highlight community partners’ roles and their impact on the students’ social development based on qualitative case study research.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on a number of initiatives in civil engineering undergraduate programmes at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) that allow students to complete engineering projects in the community, enabling them to learn by doing.

A formal commitment to civic engagement was undertaken by the NUIG in 2001 with the establishment of the Community Knowledge Initiative (CKI) to work on mainstreaming civic engagement (service learning) within the curriculum across the institution. Today, the majority of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in the College of Engineering and Informatics at NUIG have embedded service learning into their curriculum. These initiatives allow students to work with and in local communities, international communities and multi‐disciplinary groups as part of their academic courses. The paper investigates and shows that community‐based projects can enhance student learning and engagement in a number of ways. At NUIG, these projects are framed by a research orientation, commitments to civic engagement and building university‐community partnerships, city‐university partnerships and partnerships with other official agencies, so that community users can provide real learning problems and contexts for students and researchers and benefit from the results.

It was found that the students got a sense of pride and satisfaction out of the knowledge that their work may be helping communities and that learning is not just to get marks to pass the exam! The projects can increase the students’ sense of ownership of their own learning. Learners are more motivated when they can see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has an impact on others.

The work represents work done in one institution affecting a region in a country. This can be extended to include more institutions and other regions. This paper presents evidence from the aforementioned projects that by creating service‐based learning the students’ energy in learning can have a positive impact on the community.

The energy and enthusiasm of learners can be better utilised (and increased) by setting assignments as real community‐based projects.

This lies in the design of projects and assessment involving education providers and public for the benefit of learners and the society at large.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of student learning from community engagement by critically assessing the implementation of this pedagogical approach in the context of teaching and learning chemistry and also evaluating the role of personal development in student‐community engagement.

A case study on the implementation since 2007 of community‐based learning (also called service‐learning) projects in an academic department in Ireland is presented. Analysis of assessment grades, student reflective accounts and evaluation questionnaires informs this work, as does a recently completed self‐assessment of our activities using Shumer's Self‐Assessment for Service‐Learning.

A marked improvement in student engagement and confidence, and their appreciation of how their subject is applied in real‐world situations, is reported. Some difficulties arise however, in relation to the level of critical thinking and self‐awareness evident in reflective writing assignments, as the students were generally not experienced in reflection on personal experiences. The extent to which it has been demonstrated that genuine community needs are being met is also an issue in some instances.

The paper describes some innovative practices, as CBL is not well established in the discipline concerned, chemistry, and it has also not often been applied to the benefit of small local businesses. A critical analysis of the process followed when CBL activities were implemented in an institution without an existing, well‐established culture of applying this pedagogical approach is provided, as this is a perspective not often explored in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to train primary health care workers to be trainers and implementers of community‐based AIDS prevention activities in Oyo State, Nigeria, by describing an evaluation of the project.

A total of 148 primary health care workers recruited from the 33 local government areas (LGA) of the state were trained as trainers. They were provided seed grants to replicate similar training for health workers, implement and evaluate community‐based AIDS prevention activities. Questionnaires were used before and after the training and the community based projects to evaluate its impact on knowledge of cause of AIDS, routes of HIV transmission, signs and symptoms of AIDS, and precautions to prevent.

At pre‐test, only 30.8 per cent of trainers could list at least four signs and symptoms of AIDS compared with 70.9 per cent who could do so after the training. The trainers trained 973 health workers; the number trained ranged from 20‐80 with a mean of 32.4. The trainers also implemented community‐based AIDS prevention interventions which reached 2,082 persons including adolescents (48.2 per cent), long‐distance drivers (16.6 per cent), market men and women (15.8 per cent), female sex workers (14.2 per cent), traditional birth attendants (4.6 per cent) and herdsmen and women (5.6 per cent). The evaluation conducted after four months of implementation of the community‐based projects showed improvement in knowledge of HIV among all the target groups. It suggests reduction in reported unprotected sex among drivers (from 44 per cent at pre‐test to 18.9 per cent at post‐test) and increase in reported consistent use of condoms (from 53.4 per cent at pre‐test to 71.4 per cent at post‐test) among female sex workers.

Primary health care workers can successfully implement community‐based HIV/AIDS prevention activities.

Primary health care workers can make important contributions to HIV/AIDS prevention and control efforts.

Health education interventions delivered by primary health care workers multiplied the effects of HIV/AIDS prevention and control activities.

This paper explores how task characteristics in terms of trigger type and task topic influence individual participation in community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development by considering participation in individual tasks rather than entire projects.

A quantitative study was designed using choose tasks that were carried out via the email discourse on the developers' email fora in five FLOSS projects. Choice process episodes were selected as the unit of analysis and were coded for the task trigger and topic. The impact of these factors on participation (i.e. the numbers of participants and messages) was assessed by regression.

The results reveal differences in participation related to different task triggers and task topics. Further, the results suggest the mediating role of the number of participants in the relationships between task characteristics and the number of messages. The authors also speculate that project type serves as a boundary condition restricting the impacts of task characteristics on the number of participants and propose this relationship for future research.

Empirical support was provided to the important effects of different task characteristics on individual participation behaviors in FLOSS development tasks.

The findings can help FLOSS participants understand participation patterns in different tasks and choose the types of tasks to attend to.

This research explores the impact of task characteristics on participation in FLOSS development at the task level, while prior research on participation in FLOSS development has focused mainly on factors at the individual and/or project levels.

As the only research-intensive university in South Africa outside a metropolitan area, Rhodes University’s mission has foregrounded community engagement (CE) for over a decade, in order to contribute to the development of the surrounding region. This involves building stronger social compacts with community partners through meaningful student engagement in socially accountable ways. In Psychology as a discipline within South Africa, there are strong imperatives for transformation, and decolonization of psychological theory, research, and therapeutic practice require re-examination of curricula, in conjunction with contextual needs for increasing access to psychological assistance. This chapter aims to illustrate ways in which we have worked to translate ideas from the Psychology discipline into CE activities, which in turn has created new knowledge.

Community-based service learning (CBSL) has been embedded into three Psychology Honors-level modules, resonating with the students’ desires to contribute to greater social justice through translating theory into “real world” activities. This research draws from the experiences of the module coordinators (the authors), providing perceptions of coordinating a CBSL module. We assess the contributions and benefits for both students and community partners, also highlighting the challenges encountered. The case studies of modules outline their philosophy, content, and value. Partnership development is described, and students’ reflections on two modules (Community Psychology and Childhood Disability & Mental Health) provide examples of some of their shifts in understanding applied psychology and increased social awareness. The accounts show how students provided assistance and support in their contributions to the different settings. Recommendations are made for enhancing CBSL, including considerations when planning for students, community partners, and faculty staff.

This paper aims to focus on the process of critically evaluating Dublin Institute of Technology's Programme for Students Learning With Communities after its first year of operation. The programme supports and promotes community‐based learning/service‐learning across DIT.

The paper is presented in the form of a case study, wherein the context for the work is outlined, addressing both strengths and weaknesses of the practice to date, and comment briefly on wider implications.

After nine months an evaluation of the programme was carried out. It identified four main areas where it was felt there was potential for improvement: reflection on learning; the nature and quality of student, staff and community engagement on projects; project evaluations; student involvement in project planning and recruitment to community‐based research projects. Each area is addressed in turn and the actions taken to date to enhance the service delivery is described. Some initial thoughts on the implications of the work are given.

This paper will be of value to students, educators and community partners interested in the possibilities inherent in students learning with communities, and in the process of reflection on this work.