Wits University Integrated Report 2020

18 3.2. Vice-Chancellor’s Review In 2020, I announced that I would be stepping down as Vice-Chancellor at the end of the year and so this period was used to close an academic restructuring exercise which began seven years earlier. In broad terms, this restructuring has been reported on in previous reports.

However, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic shifted developments in quite significant ways and overshadowed what was meant to be a concluding year for the programme by forcing a whole series of new initiatives to address the challenges which are outlined in more detail in the report.

In 2020, we once again moved closer towards our strategic objective of increasing postgraduate numbers with our total number of postgraduate students being just over 15 000 which is approximately 38% of our student body. Our throughput continues to increase gradually and over 9 500 students graduated in 2019.

Due to the pandemic, the University’s academic programme shifted online for the majority of the year. Initially, there was debate about whether to shift to online learning given the deep inequalities of our society and student body. The University adopted the view that we cannot retreat to the lowest common denominator and halt the academic programme. Instead, we actively mitigated for the inequalities in our community through the procurement and distribution of 4 000 devices to those in need.

The University also provided mobile data to our 37 000 students and subsequently to our staff. This allowed us to shift our operations online in a significant way. The academic, professional and administrative staff, particularly those in our Information and Communications Technology Department, worked beyond the call of duty and we were broadly able to deliver the academic programme online and complete the academic year. This process was closely monitored by the DVC: Academic and Faculties, and appropriately adjusted as and when required. The net effect of this intervention saw an increase in attendance rates of lectures and tutorials, and pass rates were broadly in line with previous years.

Wits’ shift to emergency remote learning was one of the more successful in the system.

With the onset of the pandemic, we anticipated a decline in research output due to our academic staff playing a more substantial role in online teaching. Nevertheless, we are pleased to report that research output is broadly the same as the previous year. Our research impact can also be measured through our knowledge and social