Momentum in Johannesburg: IS4NCDs Consortium Advances Planning on Day Four

7 May 2026

The fourth day of the IS4NCDs Regional Consortium Meeting in Johannesburg was a full and substantive one, covering project administration, pilot scheduling, publication planning, and the development of an evaluation framework.

The day opened with a project management and coordination session, during which the consortium received a comprehensive overview of upcoming deadlines, milestones, and deliverables for the remainder of the year and into the project's final year. Key administrative matters addressed included the submission of implementation programmes, applications for micro-credentials, and progress reports — all with deadlines falling within the coming months.

The consortium was reminded of the importance of timely communication regarding any anticipated delays, as well as the need to maintain thorough financial and administrative records, given that the project remains subject to external review for several years beyond its end date. Financial arrangements — including the structure of the pre-financing model and the timeline for final project payments — were also clarified, with an open invitation for partner institutions to raise any concerns about their capacity to manage interim costs.

Guidance was provided on external communication requirements, including the mandatory use of the project's visual identity and EU funding acknowledgements across all dissemination and communication activities. The consortium was also introduced to an impact tracker tool designed to help partners log their dissemination activities throughout the project's lifetime, ensuring accurate reporting at the project's conclusion.

A significant portion of the morning was dedicated to the collaborative development of a pilot schedule for the project's nine modules, which span core, intermediate, advanced, and executive levels. Working in module-type groups, consortium members worked through a shared planning tool to map out realistic timelines for piloting, taking into account academic calendars, accreditation timelines, public holidays, and staffing availability across the participating institutions.

Each group reported back to the plenary with their provisional plans. Across the board, the second half of the calendar year emerged as the most feasible window for piloting, with most contact sessions planned between August and November. The executive-level course, designed as a condensed in-person offering for a small cohort of senior professionals, was provisionally planned for the following year, to allow it to benefit from lessons learned during the earlier pilots.

The plenary noted the clustering of pilot activities in October and November, flagging this as a potential operational risk, and encouraged groups to consider spreading activities where possible. Discussions also touched on participant sequencing across modules, delivery modalities (online, face-to-face, and hybrid), and the importance of coordinating teaching responsibilities across consortium members.

The afternoon began with a structured overview of the consortium's publication pipeline. It was acknowledged that while the project's primary mandate is curriculum development, academic publication remains an important vehicle for dissemination and knowledge contribution. An authorship policy — already circulated among consortium members — was briefly revisited, with a reminder that authorship requires active contribution at multiple stages of the writing process in line with internationally recognised criteria.

Several publications were discussed, spanning the full arc of the project: from an overarching descriptive paper introducing the project as a whole, to evaluations of the individual modules, to more conceptually focused pieces on topics such as challenge-based learning, competency development, and the use of co-design in curriculum development. Two publications are already in active development, with the remainder dependent on the outcomes of the piloting phase. The consortium agreed on a process whereby new publication ideas should be submitted to the steering committee for review and approval before work commences, in order to ensure strategic coordination across the consortium.

The potential for conference presentations and abstract submissions was also raised, with members encouraged to flag relevant upcoming events early so that the consortium could be deliberate in its dissemination strategy.

The final session of the day focused on how the consortium will evaluate its work — both at the level of individual modules and across the project as a whole. Following a brief energising activity, the group engaged in an open discussion on evaluation approaches, drawing on established frameworks from the fields of implementation science and training evaluation.

The conversation explored how best to capture participant learning and professional transformation, with proposals including pre- and post-assessments, reflective portfolios, and retrospective self-assessment tools. The relative merits of quantitative and qualitative approaches were considered, and the group discussed how data gathered through module evaluations could feed into broader project-level evaluation and, ultimately, into academic publications.

A key outcome of this discussion was agreement on the need to develop an overarching evaluation protocol to be submitted for ethics review, with the aim of securing approval in time for the commencement of piloting. A small core writing group volunteered to take this forward, with an initial draft to be shared with the wider consortium in the coming weeks. It was noted that the ethics submission deadline would need to be met by June in order to receive approval before the end of September — when piloting is due to begin.

The day closed with a clear sense of momentum. The consortium had moved from broad planning to tangible commitments: a provisional pilot calendar, a coordinated publication plan, and a path forward for ethical approvals. The writing group for the evaluation protocol was asked to remain briefly to begin dividing tasks, while the rest of the group was released for the afternoon.