Digitisation not panacea for varsity space

A few days ago, I participated in a televised discussion focusing on the role that digitisation could play in responding to the massive demand for access to higher education in South Africa.  

Joined by Universities South Africa (USAf) CEO Dr Pethiwe Matutu and doctoral candidate Busisiwe Sibizo, we broadly agreed that the ever-increasing matric numbers could not be adequately accommodated by the 26 public universities, 50 technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges and the nine public community education and training (CET) colleges.  

This seems like stating the obvious, doesn’t it? A matter of grave concern is the lack of clear solutions to addressing the problem. There is no point in arguing that South African universities shouldn’t digitalise; they are. 

Every day, staff and students use learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Blackboard, Zoom, Teams and others for teaching and learning. 

Many universities have exclusively online programmes and qualifications, with virtual classrooms and assessments. Some students even prefer e-books and online articles as opposed to those of us who enjoy sitting at the library with a good book in hand. 

Furthermore, some of our universities have sophisticated and technologically advanced online applications and apps to track student enrolments, staffing needs, employee workload allocations, leave, grants, performance targets and areas of improvement. 

It is not my intention to dismiss or reject digitisation of higher education. I cannot reasonably do that. I only trouble the taken-for-granted assumption growing in the South Africa media and broader society that the uptake and digitisation of modules will be the panacea to the rapid demand for space at university. It is that logic that I challenge here.  

The present realities of South Africa 

The calls for digitisation of higher education in response to space constraints need to be understood in our proper context. There are 23.3 million South Africans living on less than R1 300 a person a month. KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape, North West and Limpopo lead the charge, with the country’s poorest residing in those four provinces.  

The public face of poverty in SA remains the youth, especially our children. Reports reveal that 71% of the absolute poor in 2023 were all under the age of 35, with children aged 0 to 17 years comprising the 43.1% of all poor individuals. The links between low education and poverty are well documented. 

Universities have experienced disturbing increases of students who are experiencing food insecurity, hunger and homelessness, resulting in some students sleeping at computer labs and or/ lecture rooms, squatting with fellow students. 

It is of little surprise to those of us who are insiders of the higher education sector when a USAf study, in collaboration with the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), shared how up to 20% of 290 000 students in our universities have poor mental health, with some experiencing some form of suicide ideation. 

Thus, any talk about scaling up digitalisation of higher education as a solution to the large demand for access to university must fiercely confront the structural challenges that are deeply concerning. 

On the demand for space at university

First, it is true that there is a real disconnection between the basic education outcomes and our public higher education uptakes in the country.

This year alone, for instance, learners who passed matric,qualifying for tertiary education, exceeded 700 000. 

Dr Linda Meyer, in her sobering article, reveals the stark numbers — of the 700 000 or so  learners who qualified for tertiary education, about 345 000 learners passed with bachelor passes, more than 250 000 learners passed with a diploma and more 130 000 learners with a higher certificate. 

In contrast, the 26 public universities can accommodate only 230 000 first-year students. 

To put the numbers into perspective, the University of Johannesburg received more than 450 000 applications for only 11 200 first year spaces, while North-West University received more than 420 000 applications for only 11 800 first year spaces.

The University of the Witwatersrand received more than 116 000 applications for only 6 000 spaces, while the University of Cape Town received more than 92 000 applications when it had space for only 4 500 first years. If this is not a national crisis, what is it? 

Our public higher education system cannot absorb the growing numbers produced by our basic education sector. 

Secondly, SA is a country that is fundamentally shaped by and firmly rooted in the digital divide. This divide presents itself through race and class, with the Black working class in the township and rural areas experiencing the worst of this marginality and structural dispossession.

Research tells us that while 79% of all South Africans have some form of access to the internet, we still have at least 21.1% of the population without any access. The majority of them live in the township and rural areas and they tend to face additional barriers through little to no internet access, weak connectivity, the absence of cellphones towers, expensive data costs, amongst others. 

Thus, the call for digitisation (and scaling up) of higher education ought to be understood with the above in mind.

On digitisation and the scaling-up of curricula

The digitisation of higher education is usually presented as our only solution to the ever-growing demand for access to university education in SA. 

Words such as “democratising access”, “embracing 4IR”, and the modern university as a “technological hub” have all sought to legitimate the emergence and rapid uptake of digitisation. Two concerns remain.

Firstly, the relationship between digital literacies and academic literacies is not entirely clear to me. This means that one’s ability to successfully engage and participate in/ with/ across online learning platforms such as Moodle, Blackboard amongst others, does not necessarily mean one has the academic and disciplinary grammar to necessarily engage in the academic discourses and practices of a particular field. 

Put differently, how does the digitisation of higher education curricula + pedagogy enable students to have what the late University of the Western Cape educationist Wally Morrow called “epistemological access?” 

How can online technologies facilitate deeper disciplinary understandings of a field? In another paper, I have previously argued that what made teaching and learning at the height of the COVID-19 restrictions so unbearable was the dumping of curricula material online and academics calling that digital pedagogy. 

The second concern, related to the first, is how knowledge is absent in conversations on the digitisation of higher education. 

For those of us who are proponents of an Afrocentric, decolonial and anti-neoliberal scholarship, the absence of knowledge conversations in the digitisation of higher education is terrifying, to say the least. 

This means that we may very well be digitising and massifying colonial, outdated and limited knowledge on the Global South. 

Critical questions remain: What counts as knowledge? How is knowledge produced, legitimated, recontextualised and reproduced in teaching and learning? 

Whose knowledge matters? 

Who is a valued knower in curricula? 

In this contested period of global Trumpian fascism, racism and sexism in our lives – the producers of knowledge, were they geopolitically located? 

These and other questions are key to understanding the digitisation of higher education. 

Universities in the Global North and beyond have tapped into digitisation to create new and innovative technologies to create virtual e-universities and online classrooms that transcend time and space. 

This has enabled them to globally compete for talented academics, gifted students and skilled staff who have helped them grow and improve their rankings and international prestige. 

While South African universities already do take advantage of such platforms, progress is far from convincing. 

Our national approach to digitisation in response to space constraints needs to take into account the massive socio-economic and racial disparities in our country. 

We must also factor in the country’s crippling poverty and deeply entrenched inequality so as to ensure that this digitisation of the higher education system is rooted in equity, social justice and meaningful democracy. Anything less is a travesty. 

Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo is an associate professor at the Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies at the University of Johannesburg. He writes in his personal capacity.