The concept of digitization of African universities is not a new concept. Online learning within universities was a highly contentious issue causing heated debates over the years. The COVID-19 pandemic fast tracked online learning within African universities, and 2020 saw a new online pedagogy of teaching and learning that replaced a traditional classroom scenario with a virtual classroom within African universities. To prevent the spread of the virus, government and university leadership within many African countries saw online learning as the only alternative that could keep the university students and staff safe during the pandemic. The major objective of this chapter is to unpack challenges faced by African universities when they migrated to a virtual learning platform. The opportunity of added metaverse technologies into online programs will also be addressed. The researcher will highlight the challenges faced by the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and provide insights on what this South African university did to manage these challenges.
TopIntroduction And Background To Online- Learning Within African Universities
According to (Naidoo, 2021) the COVID-19 pandemic brought on by the novel coronavirus, has spread across borders and reached countries throughout the world. This deadly and dangerous virus is a silent energy that has wreaked havoc on a country’s’ society, schools, universities, business arena, medical fraternity and its law and order institutions world-wide. It has challenged society and cut at the very core of humanities ability to be social beings and wreaked havoc with people’s lives. To keep abreast of World Health Organization that COVID-19 is a deadly virus, to keep safe people have to practice social distancing. In 2020 in response to the pandemic, universities in Africa, mandated by government very quickly took up the challenge and transformed at a very accelerated pace their universities from traditional classrooms to virtual classroom mode. This was not an easy task and many teething problems popped up. This is a predictable normality when a new pedagogical teaching and learning platform is developed and implemented in the African continent.
However, over the months and year, great inroads have been made with African universities as they recreated their university offerings and curriculum and went onto virtual platforms. The accelerated pace of moving from the traditional to a virtual classroom was a very stressful time for all academics, students, and other stakeholders in higher education. South African universities transformed quite nicely onto virtual platforms. This could be due to South Africa being one of the countries in Africa that has very well developed infrastructure in place.
(Cavus and Zabadi, 2014) argue that in trying to move away from the traditional paper and pen environment or face-to-face physical classroom, learning management systems (web-based learning environment to disseminate content) is one of the most highly adopted and used online environments in higher education institutions for e-learning. This includes open-source software learning management systems (free of charge, where the source code can be changed) such as Moodle, Open edX and Chamilo, and cloudbased learning management systems (with a start-up cost and source code that cannot be changed) such as Canvas, Sakai, dot Learn and others. (Selwyn, 2004) further argued that the dichotomous aspect of digital divide clearly reveals the students that either have access or do not have access to technological resources, and this influences the status of connectedness (either connected or not connected). Governments and educational institutions look at e-learning as one option that can be exploited to achieve the important millennium goal, which is ‘education for all’.