Reactor Essentials — a curated path
Hand-picked chapters drawn from across the CRE series
Durban · South Africa
Modern Scholarship
Systems, books and research that take on societal problems: how students succeed, how a municipality chooses and runs its sanitation, how a research centre is governed, how a small enterprise gets its product into the field. The work is done with the institutions that carry those problems, and everything it produces is published.
44systems in research and development
19with a public demo
186books in the Press
12published artefacts
1The Modern Scholarship suite
Three systems that together are Modern Scholarship's answer to the university: AutoScholar for the work of the institution, ScholarCloud for the student, Giants’ Shoulders for the researcher. Built on one platform, one database and one set of members, and sold as one suite. Each card opens a walkthrough of the system in screenshots; where a public demo exists, its address sits beneath. The systems that run for an institution are reached through that institution only. Every other system on this page is a Modern Scholarship project too.
2Library science
Three systems for the library and the research office: benchmarking a coalition of libraries, the research ethics committee's whole workflow, and the repository that answers questions from its own holdings. Each card opens a walkthrough in screenshots; the demonstration beneath each is open to anyone.
3The nature of the work
Modern Scholarship is applied research with a product at the end of it. Each strand below started from a problem an institution brought, and each has produced working systems that the institution now runs, books that explain the method, and papers that hold it to account.
Education
Student success at scale: early warning, advising, casework and executive insight for universities; a learning platform that teaches from published books; and companions for children whose learning needs a different shape.
Water and sanitation
The WASH R&D Centre's programmes: de-risking decentralised sanitation in the field, deciding which technology suits which settlement, river and catchment monitoring, water accounts, and the science of the treatment works written for the people who run them.
Municipal support
Decision support built with a metropolitan municipality: settlement registers with their geometry, commitments read from the integrated development plan, schedules costed against the works and the fleet, and the strategy document a council can defend.
Leadership and governance
How a research centre, a journal, a conference or an accreditation is run: projects and finance, editorial desks, review, readiness against the standards, and the records that survive an audit.
Enterprise
Getting products into the field and paid for: a probe line and the telemetry behind it, a chemicals exchange, a laboratory's sample tracking, certificates as a revenue rail, and payroll for a South African employer.
4The systems in the foreground
Five of the 44 systems carry most of the programme's weight today. Each picture is a screenshot of the system as it runs.
AutoScholar
The student success system. It reads an institution's results, registrations and attendance, finds the students and the courses that need attention, and writes the advice: to the student, to the lecturer, to the programme and faculty coordinators, and to executive management. The judgement rests on applied statistics and graph theory over progression maps; language models draft the advice and never make the call. It runs at three universities behind their own logins, with early warning, advising, booking, casework and the executive insight surfaces.
runs for the institutions that licence it; the walkthrough above shows it
ScholarCloud
The learning platform the programme's systems sit in: courses and lessons, assessment and grading, advising and casework, admissions and alumni, and a research workspace for staff. A book published in Publon Press can be taught from directly, with the tutorial layer marking the work. Institutions run it on their own instance; a demo world is open to anyone.
Publon Press
The publishing side of the programme: books written to be read in a browser, and papers published as standing pages rather than PDFs. 186 books are in the catalogue today, from the Modern Scholarship Practitioner Series to the reaction engineering courses and the WASH R&D Centre's wastewater series, with six curated collections that give a reader a path through them.
SanPath
The sanitation technology decision method as a system, built with eThekwini Water and Sanitation. A settlement's variables are recorded once; the options that fit it are screened against a register of rules written from the standards, ranked on fit beside cost, and read at the stage the municipality has committed the settlement to. Across the settlements the commitments compose into a schedule. Every recommendation carries its rules and their sources, so it can be defended line by line.
InfraTrack
The field record of the WESS de-risking programme: sites, installed units, monitoring runs, hazards and the mitigation register, with the SenseArray telemetry from the field units folded in. It is the evidence base the sanitation decisions above are calibrated against, and the place a municipality sees whether a technology is operating within specification.
5The programme
Modern Scholarship began as a project to give educators the access and training to teach with modern approaches, and it has kept that aim while the tools around it grew. The programme is organised in nine areas, and each area has produced at least one working system.
- Connected classrooms. Effective classroom communication, advising of at-risk and of cum laude students, course content creation, automated class advising.
- Instructional design. Knowledge representation as the basis of a course, ontologies, the visualisation of complex concepts, and Publon Press as the place the material is published.
- Student central. Knowledge production in the twenty-first century, its financial drivers, class expectations, and the avoidance of false diligence.
- Degree accreditation. Choosing an accreditation programme, range statements for graduate attributes at emerging, intermediate and exit level, rigorous evaluation criteria, the accreditation record, and the Accreditation AutoMate that keeps it.
- Analysing academic programmes. Progression maps from graph theory, gatekeeper courses, the results mart behind them.
- Student casework. Cases, referrals and the counselling team's view.
- Alumni. Relationships, campaigns and giving after graduation.
- Research gateway. The research workspace and the compute behind it.
- Executive insight. Graduation understood as a min-plus-x process, the market for lemons in qualifications, and where rankings belong in the scheme of things.
6Publon Press
Books written to be read in a browser, with the figures, the equations and the exercises alive on the page, and papers published as standing pages rather than PDFs. The Modern Scholarship Practitioner Series is written for the people the programme serves; the engineering and science series come from the WASH R&D Centre and the reaction engineering courses; the school series carry the grade-six and grade-seven material the family companions teach from.
Collections
Chemical Reaction Engineering — the grand tour
One chapter from each turning point of the five-volume series
Decentralised sanitation — from science to de-risking
A curated path through the WESS wastewater and de-risking material
The Modern Scholarship Practitioner Series
The complete shelf: seventeen role-based courses for everyone who runs a university, built on the AutoScholar platform
Chemical Reaction Engineering
A five-volume course from the mole balance to heterogeneous catalysis
The WESS Programme
Water Efficient Sanitation — the WASH R&D Centre engineering, de-risking and finance programme
Recently published or revised
- Working with AI on Your Own Research
- The Practice of Waste Water Treatment
- The Science of Waste Water Treatment
- Chemical Reaction Engineering — Volume 1
- Chemical Reaction Engineering — Volume 2
- Chemical Reaction Engineering — Volume 3
- Chemical Reaction Engineering — Volume 4
- Chemical Reaction Engineering — Volume 5
- Foundations of Applied Mathematics
- Probability & Statistical Inference
- Numerical Methods
- Substrate Mathematics
Published artefacts
Standing documents, each a page of its own: method write-ups, protocols, study guides and programme pages. An artefact is revised in place and its screenshots are taken from the live system it describes.
Sanitation Technology Decision Framework
Which sanitation system suits this settlement? — the decision tool
The Practice of Waste Water Treatment
Problems identified in a treatment works, and the solutions applied to them
A Wastewater Treatment Works, Unit by Unit
An illustrated atlas of the municipal works — liquid train, recycles and the sludge line
WESS Wastewater Chemistry — Study Guide
Compartments, chemistry, and diagnosis behind the WESS Unified Site-Evaluation Protocol
WESS Engineering De-Risking Protocol — Integrated Edition
Operational assessment, HAZOP and continuous monitoring for water-efficient sanitation systems
Reagent — LFER explorer
Interactive linear free-energy relationship explorer
Reagent — schema & worked example
The two needs, the schema, and a correlation fitted end to end
Ascaris Egg Viability as a Rate Process
A kinetics treatment of helminth egg inactivation
Evaluating the Steps in Understanding
Step-level diagnostic learning
WESS Ecosystem Integration
How the pieces of the WESS programme fit together
Where South Africa's Water Goes
A cited rainfall-to-tap balance
Municipal Support Programme
Nine modular service areas across the Stabilise, Recover and Transform reform path
7Research and development
Every system the programme has built, whether or not it is hosted for the public. Each card links to the demo version only; a demo world carries synthetic data and asks nothing of a visitor. The systems that run for institutions or a research centre do so behind their own logins and are not linked here.
Water, sanitation and the WASH R&D Centre 12
SanPath
The sanitation technology decision method as a system: a settlement's variables, the options that fit it at its stage and at the stage the municipality has committed it to, and the schedule of those commitments.
InfraTrack
The WESS de-risking programme's field record: sites, units, monitoring runs, hazards and the mitigation register, with SenseArray's telemetry folded in.
SenseArray
Provider self-service over the same telemetry: a company's devices, runs and readings, with member API keys for field units.
Centrix
The research-centre console: projects, finance, staff, equipment, events and messages for the WASH R&D Centre.
WESS Forum
The forum of the WESS programme: grantees, technology providers and the municipality, with the programme's documents and decisions.
WessPulse
The programme's pulse: the sites' status flags and scored mitigation registers from the raw measurements.
no public demo yet
RiverHealth
River health monitoring: sampling sites, indices and trends over the hydrology record.
HydroLens
Catchment and water-account views over the AmanziTrack record.
no public demo yet
GeoStage
Geospatial staging: layers and points assembled for the WASH programmes' maps.
no public demo yet
SDG Interlinkages
Indicator-interaction scoring across the Sustainable Development Goals, instanced per country, with export and LLM-assisted harvesting.
NanoStream
The NanoStream Blu probe line: the product, its channel model and the field units that post to SenseArray.
no public demo yet
Chemicals Without Borders
A chemicals exchange for laboratories and centres: what is held, what is offered, what is sought.
Scholarship, teaching and learning 17
PublonPress
The scholarly publishing destination: the reader, the books, the collections and the tutorial layer. The webbooks below open in it.
no public demo yet
ScholarCloud
The learning platform: one student account across institutions (the front door at scholarcloud.live), courses, assessment, advising, casework, run for institutions. The Publoom research workspace is its own card.
Giants’ Shoulders
The researcher's workbench: the repository the course "Working with AI on your own research" builds (models, provenance, verified references, checks, decisions, experiments, the AI-use declaration), read by the supervisor against the rubric; the centre's programme and candidatures from Centrix; the library and watches from Publoom.
Publoom Press
The research workspace that weaves text from a repository: ask the corpus with cited answers, compose artefacts, map a collection, read and annotate. One codebase, configured per venue: the academic/library instance, the Researcher venue (my library, keeping up, funding), the Libraries demo, and the standalone RAG demo.
AutoScholar
Student success analytics for universities: results, early warning, advising and the executive insight surfaces, run per institution behind their own login.
no public demo yet
NeuroCraft
The day-view learning companion for a child with ADHD: today's plan, practice, progress and term tests.
NeuroPlay
Play-based speech and cognition for a non-verbal child with cerebral palsy.
LevelGrind
Levelled practice: a grind through graded exercises with mastery tracking.
no public demo yet
Substrate Mathematics
The Substrate mathematics volumes as a navigable site.
no public demo yet
UKZN Registration
Registration advice for UKZN: curricula, rules and the advisor.
no public demo yet
EthiKit
Research ethics workflow: applications, reviews, conditions and approvals.
CertHub
Certificates issued, verified and paid for: the credential and revenue rail behind the short courses.
no public demo yet
LibreFlow
Library benchmarking for South African libraries: returns, validation, benchmarks, gaps and the improvement cycle.
LibreVolve
The evolving library: collections, circulation and review, classic and new.
ConvenOr
Academic conferences from call to proceedings: submissions, review, programme and the proceedings flywheel.
no public demo yet
EditorialDesk
The journal desk: submissions, reviewers, decisions and issues over the platform's services.
no public demo yet
AccredReady
Accreditation readiness: the clause wall, conformity evidence and computed readiness per programme.
no public demo yet
Platform, data and integration 6
Schema Studio
Design a schema in the browser, preview it in memory, provision it on the wire and run it through the generic bindings.
API Integrator
Connections to outside APIs and datasets, with schemas, runs and Earth Engine access.
no public demo yet
BenchStamp
Laboratory sample tracking with QR stamps, approval chains and project finance.
Payroll
Payroll for a South African employer: runs, the EMP201 with SDL, retro difference runs and payslip self-service.
no public demo yet
Orc Hub
The fleet's coordination hub: boards, outcomes and the operations register for every session working this codebase.
no public demo yet
Analyst Gateway
The maths compute tier: ten aspect workbenches over a Rust engine.
no public demo yet
Sector systems 8
SureTrack
An insurance marketplace: rating, quotes, policies, claims and reconciliation.
MinTrack
Mine and tailings monitoring: sites, samples and the compliance record.
no public demo yet
PartnerDesk
Partner and grant relationships: agreements, obligations and reporting.
no public demo yet
CivicWorks
Municipal works requests and their resolution.
no public demo yet
WellWork
Workplace wellness: check-ins, referrals and the counselling team's view.
no public demo yet
AdvanceHub
Alumni and advancement: relationships, campaigns and giving.
no public demo yet
StaffRoom
The staff room: leave, attendance and the people register.
no public demo yet
PracticeOS
A practice's operating system: clients, casework and billing.
no public demo yet
Family and personal 1
Zelf
Private daily pages: the habit layer of the life plan.
no public demo yet
8Contact
Modern Scholarship is led by Randhir Rawatlal. Write to [email protected].