I read last year (2024) that 5 new universities were being planned. With News 24 declaiming a graduate unemployment rate of 24%, I have wondered whether another handful of new institutions is the best way to spend our country’s limited resources. The StatsSA report in the tale of the two new universities shows that academics scored. In 2014 SPU had 29 permanent staff, and this rose to 609 in 2021. For UMP, the number climbed from 160 to 570 in the same time period (I’m not sure what the numbers are today, in 2025). During the past decade, youth (aged 15-34) unemployment increased. According to Stats SA the official unemployment rate was 36,9%. Ten years later unemployment sits at 46,1%. South Africa’s rising debt (R5.26 trillion, up from R1.79 trillion 10 years ago), also makes you wonder about the wisdom of spending R17 billion (that was Business Live’s projection) to set up two new universities.
My part in the new universities.
I was involved in the deliberations about an ed tech roll out in Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape, at UMP and SPU respectively. In 2012 / 2013 Stephen Marquard, Dolf Jordaaan, Dolf Steyn, Brenda Mallinson and I assisted the “New Universities Project Management Team“. By then, I had been in Higher Education for a full time for three years. We’d installed Sakai and I found myself chairing this small group of colleagues. I don’t remember the details but I assume the boss passed on this task to me, for which I am very grateful. Courtesy of Blackboard, I got a trip to Las Vegas. In hindsight, it sounds like a “kick-back” but the boss approved it! He and I thought it looked like an academic conference (it was a trade show). I assume it was reward for the many late hours.
The New Universities Project Management Team had asked us to draft an elearning strategy for the two new universities, Sol Plaatjie and University of Mpumulanga. For some strange reason, people thought that I was a strategic thinker. Stephen and Dolf are far better in that regard. Anyway, I chaired the group and took on the next impossible challenge with gusto. How do you create an e-learning strategy without visiting a campus, assessing the conditions etc? Honestly, I don’t know. Probably look to experience.
Within the constraints of the brief, the five of us did a pretty fine job of presenting options. I certainly learned lots from these experts and cherish (I really do) Dolf ‘s “Contextualisation of EdTech resources” presentation. This collection of photographs and commentary was eye opening for a green ed techie at Wits.
Recently I looked through the Wits closing out report. I noticed that there was no mention of our considered deliberations. Pity. Learning is cumulative, and we learn through shared experience. Its why I think archives are so important.
Essentially the universities were faced with the simple question. Do we go proprietary (Blackboard) or do we go Open Source (Sakai). The committee put forward the following five questions for the project team.
- What factors favour buying a commercial LMS or supporting an open-source application?
- What systems need to be integrated with the LMS and does the LMS support the integration of these systems?
- Once a LMS is selected, what plans are in place to ensure the smooth migration of existing course materials to the selected system?
- Do these two new universities have the development and support expertise necessary to maintain system stability and integrity and integrate the LMS with other campus tools and data?
- Does the university have the budget to sustain LMS adoption, modification, development and growth into the future?
The recommendations that the group decided on were to go the proprietary route. I was happy to accede to my colleague’s experience. Pragmatically speaking, Sakai had been very challenging and the LMS remained a pain. Perhaps somebody else could run it better.
I got a trip to Vegas, where I took an extra journey to explore Bean Tree country, met some of the folks from the University of Phoenix, lost and find my wallet at Sedona on Friday, got buffeted by storms at the Grand Canyon on Saturday, had a small little stop at Denny’s Dinner and then a sleepover at the Riverside Resort Hotel on Sunday where the Losers Lounge offered an excess of hotel “Marge”
So, as the next set of experts are called in to share their thoughts about modernity and technology’s role, I’ll restate the conclusion of our 2013 recommendations.
Conclusion of our report
E-learning (however we understand the concept) is growing phenomena across Africa and it has become more prominent in tertiary education in South Africa. At the coalface, lecturer’s are using electronic resources (data projectors interactive whiteboards, document cameras, clickers etc) to inject new digital materials into their teaching and learning processes. Institutionally, many universities offer an elearning platform that facilitates better course communication and administration. Some courses have even incorporated alternate pedagogical practices into their course structures. Few institutions in South Africa however, have formally incorporated e-learning within institutional strategies.
Over the past decade, e-learning has become a significant mode of instruction in higher education. While this mode is neither as ubiquitous or influential as some early proponents predicted, e-learning has the potential to become a substantive pedagogy – and one, perhaps, with a pervasive influence on tertiary teaching. As these two new universities implement new programmes and courses, there is an opportunity for immediate assimilation of e-learning into new courses. While initially, as the adoption remains small in scale, e-elearning may not create demands on staff time and central resources. However, if the two new universities don’t only want ICT’s to remain on the periphery, then it is important that internal stakeholders create and adopt and institutional strategies for the deployment of e-learning.
Phase 0
Phase 0 would be the long ranger phase. it is assumed that the necessary ICT infrustructures and classroom facilities will be built into the venues and be available at these two new universities for lecturers that would like to use e-Learning in their courses.
Phase 1
Phase 1 would be the adoption phase. This will probably require a combination of designated e-learning team that would develop and configure existing infrastructure so that appropriate technologies may be embedded in course delivery. This team would be tasked with promoting the application of learning technologies across the institution in a more systematic and centralised fashion.
Phase 2
Phase 2 would be the assimilation phase where the whole institution would take a strategic look at e-learning and jointly develop their own measures to promote the use of online learning. It’s likely at this phase that university teaching will not only be dealt with, but other contentious issues, among them access, equity, the quality of university education, and even the preservation of academic freedom may have to be dealt with here.
Phase 3
Phase 3 would be the institutionalised phase where is e-learning is seen as a strategic route for the two new universities to widen access to educational opportunity, of enhance the quality of teaching, or of reduce the cost of higher education (or perhaps all three goals simultaneously).
Overall, the speed and scale of institutional response to online technology over the past 20 years suggests that e-learning is relevant to the challenges and opportunities now confronting universities. An investment in e-learning is also compatible with the ethos, institutional aims, and internal decision-making processes of the two new universities in which we proposes that it is deployed. The routes taken to systematically and officially incorporate this combination of technology and pedagogy into practices are best described as “ad-hoc”. This ad hoc state is not surprising as the introduction of elearning at an institution is usually an untidy affair as “..technology development tends to out-pace strategic thinking and pedagogical design in universities” (Janes, 2009). Over time, “lone rangers” have discovered that successful e-learning requires more than access to new technologies and is administratively onerous. As individual programmes that use elearning grow, it becomes apparent to early adopters that scaling elearning requires institutional support. While the concepts associated with e-learning have become a significant part of many a lecturer’s work load, the relationship between policy, organizational change and the implementation of e-learning is not as clear. If lecturers and university administrators want to ensure that e-learning is both sustainable and scalable, an institutional wide vision and rationale for elearning is required.
I think I still stand by these words. Profit cannot be your rationalle for e-learning (or whatever that means). Pity I didn’t publish these idea earlier.
Posted on Friday 16 May 2025, spelling and minor corrections made later.