OPINION: EDUCAT ION
LEADERSHIP, IMAGINATION AND PARTNERSHIP
The future looks bleak
The arrival of COVID-19 forced the country’s education landscape to undergo a rapid transformation. Professor Jonathan Jansen looks at what this means for the future of universities
Then came COVID-19 What we observed for schools was also true for universities: the already-present digital divide became even more obvious, but this
Our default reaction in an education crisis is to play catch-up and, when the chips are down, to blame the past’s historical injustices.
we need imagination time we could not look away. The established, mainly former white universities, transitioned smoothly to remote and fully online learning while the historically black universities found themselves stranded with hopelessly inadequate technological infrastructures for teaching students at distance in the deep rural Eastern Cape or the border regions of Limpopo province. A seldom-told perverse tale is that the more privileged universities had scaled up their investments in technologies for teaching and learning when the first ‘v’ (violence) threatened the academic year, shutting down institutions during the historic 2015–16 campus protests. When the second ‘v’ (virus) came along, these well-resourced universities were prepared to switch from one mode of teaching and learning to the next. What is also less well known is that the black universities sat with massive new infrastructures that became white elephants overnight. Over the past five years alone, the Department of Higher Education and Training invested a staggering amount of over R11-billion on residential infrastructure on university campuses. With the lockdown, these facilities stood empty of students for much of the academic year and could not even be used as a revenue stream by outside communities during university holiday periods.
In the end, the primary challenge faced by our universities is not aggregate resources, but the educational imagination. Our default reaction in an education crisis is to play catch-up and, when the chips are down, to blame the past’s historical injustices. We do not have a parallel stream of inventors and innovators who look to the future and ask compelling and daring new questions. How do we turn those empty campus residences into technology hotspots for future shutdowns? What new partnerships can be forged between government, universities and the private sector (all three will need to be involved to make this work) to make available data, devices and connections for teaching and learning at a distance? Can South Africa be the locale for cutting-edge technologies that address the unresolved challenges of online learning in professional fields such as diagnoses in clinical medicine and the supervision of the teaching practicum in schools? We can think our way out of these challenges through deliberative planning and cross-sectoral investments in next-generation technologies that support the new face of education provision in a post-COVID-19 world. The only other thing missing is leadership to take this forward.
*Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at Stellenbosch University.
The historically black universities found themselves stranded with hopelessly inadequate technological infrastructures for teaching students at distance.
IMAGE: SUPPLIED
T
he most important impact of COVID-19 on universities has been the re-organisation of the teaching and learning interface; in other words, the educational space has been forced to change. This is a good thing. Our traditional universities are conserving institutions; for the most part, teaching and learning still happens as it did a century ago when South African universities came into existence as colleges. Yes, there have been innovations on the margins such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), but as the president of a famous university in the Silicon Valley once confided, “the only problem with these MOOCs is massive and open”. Students want face-to-face teaching and lecturers are comfortable with traditional lecture routines.
The Minister of Finance in his medium-term expenditure budget just announced a R1-billion cut for higher education and training. And the private sector is highly unlikely to invest money in building technological infrastructures from scratch in the poorer universities. The digital divide between the top 13 and the bottom 13 universities will surely get worse. But is UNISA not the answer? With more than 400 000 students, the largest South African university has seen its administrative and technological infrastructures all but collapse even as a high-level panel investigates the demise of this once proud institution.
Professor Jonathan Jansen
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EMPOWERMENT
Opinion - Education.indd 34
2020/11/27 4:57 PM
