Abstract
The digital divide and unequal access to technological tools in higher education raise questions of social justice and equal opportunity. In this chapter, the authors used Amartya Sen's capability approach as an analytical framework for understanding digital accessibility in higher education and its impact on learning. Empirically, they conducted a survey of students at FSJES-Souissi, Mohamed V University of Rabat, Morocco, in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis. The results revealed the existence of a digital divide among students, particularly in terms of technological tools and continuous access to platforms. Adaptability, autonomy, and affordability are not the same for all. The distance learning experience is therefore relatively costly for some. For the post-COVID-19 crisis, they have proposed several recommendations for equitable distance higher education, primarily the need for a gradual transition to a hybrid learning mode.
Top6.1 Introduction
The digital revolution is bringing about fundamental transformations and paradigm shifts in the understanding of strategic approaches to the reform of education systems in general and higher education in particular. Almost everywhere in the world, higher education is aligning its development and its transformation with digital transitions and the appropriation of technological innovation to better adapt to the profound transformations that economic and social life is undergoing.
On the other hand, these dimensions have not been sufficiently taken seriously by developing countries and even by some developed countries. They have been slow to align their development and organization with the requirements that are at the same time opportunities of the digital revolution. Thus, in an approach that is intended to be a prerequisite for the development of the roadmap of reform to 2030, Morocco, like other countries of the South, are entitled to see in digital transitions a great opportunity and a shortcut to put their higher education system and their research and innovation on the rails of progress and modernity. Otherwise, a threatening digital divide would aggravate and amplify the delays accumulated over decades.
Furthermore, the digital divide and inequalities in access to technological tools in the field of higher education raise issues of societal justice and equal opportunity. In this research, we have used Amartya Sen's capability approach as an analytical framework to understand digital accessibility in higher education and its impact on learning. The choice of this approach is motivated by its richness both in terms of the subjects treated and the research angles adopted. It constitutes a relevant and original theoretical framework to evaluate the accessibility of university students to technological tools in the context of distance learning. In order to avoid making a utilitarian use of a complex conceptual framework, we will review the general foundations of this theory chosen for this work and we will present the interest of mobilizing such a framework in the field of education, to then apply it to the accessibility to digital enabling in the field of distance higher education.
Furthermore, on the empirical level, in order to shed light on the extent to which Moroccan universities have implemented the distance learning system, we conducted a survey among students at the Faculty of Law, Economics and Social Sciences Souissi (FSJES - Souissi), Mohamed V University of Rabat, Morocco. The objective is threefold: on the one hand, to study the relationship between the capabilities approach and digital divide in higher education; on the other hand, to investigate its applicability to students’ digital capabilities in the context of the experience of distance higher education; and finally, to draw conclusions from the empirical study and propose some recommendations for successful higher distance education after the corona disease of 2019 (COVID-19).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Distance Learning: A form of technology-based higher education in which students and academic faculty are not physically present in the classroom.
Information Society: A state of society in which information and communication technologies are democratized and play a fundamental role in the daily life of citizens.
Containment: A movement restriction policy used by some governments around the world to prevent a large-scale outbreak of COVID-19.
Digital Divide: The gap that exists between higher education students who have and know how to access knowledge in general and university courses in particular, via modern technological tools, and those who do not.
Capability: The ability of individuals to make free choices among the means and modes of higher education that they deem beneficial to them and to actually achieve them.
Digital Accessibility: The process of making modern technological tools accessible to all students in higher education.
COVID-19: Used to refer to the Coronavirus disease that emerged in 2019 in the city of Wuhan in China and spread around the world in 2020, causing an international health crisis.
Information and Communication Technology: An umbrella term that includes any communication device or application encompassing mobile phones, computer and network hardware, software, the Internet, satellite systems, and so on. ICT also refers to the various services and applications associated with them, such as videoconferencing and distance learning.