1. Introduction
On behalf of the Government of the Republic of South Africa, I would like to thank our host, the Government of Zimbabwe for hosting us at the most famous Elephant Hills Resort, especially Hon Mr David Coltart, the Minister of Education, Sports, Arts and Culture.
We also express our gratitude to the leadership of the African Brains Organisation, especially, Mr John Glassey, the Managing Director, for facilitating another social dialogue only months after a similar one held in Morocco, last year in July.
I am also accompanied by Chief Information Officers Ms Lungi Sangqu from University of South Africa, and Mr Kabelo Bokala from Tshwane University of Technology, who is also the Chairperson of the Association of South African Universities Directors of Information technology (IT). During discussions they are also available to share their experiences and learn from other institutions represented.
2. The Social – Political Context
Our resolve to fast track the use of Information and communications technology (ICT) in education is evolving in a quickest with numerous challenges. We take courage for our leaders like our first constitutional democratic Republic of South Africa, who once said: “I am fundamentally an optimist.
Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed towards the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and cannot give up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”
Nelson Mandela
Prior to South Africa’s constitutional democracy, not all South Africans had access to education. In line with the Apartheid ideology, the budget allocation for education was aligned to racially classified, systematic State-manufactured inequalities.
Challenges emanating from inequalities in education have deepened over years.
This legacy informs our planning today. There is a national resolve to invest in education and to overcome all the barriers so as to ensure that the poor are educated and skilled, as a last mile of our freedom.
3. The Key Challenges in Higher Education
- Skills Challenge - Our evolving education policy aims at promoting access, improving quality, developing research capabilities and skilling young people so as to ensure that education develops critical consciousness about our society including our economy.
The skills for economic transformation are elevated because South Africa remains the most unequal society in the world, with the majority of our citizens living in abject poverty. We have identified plus minus 3 million young people who are neither at school nor at work, the disabled and the poor from our semi- urban areas including the rural communities, as people with the most pressing educational needs. - Network Readiness Challenge - The Global Information Technology Report 2010 to 2011 of the World Economic Forum indicates that South Africa is ranked 61 out of 138 countries on the networked readiness index. The strengths in the country are:
- The first-class quality of its market (25th) and regulatory
- environments (23rd),
- Favourable laws relating to ICT (32nd),
- Strong intellectual property standards (27th), and low software piracy rate (18th)
The sophisticated business sector is at the forefront of ICT leveraging (40th and 52nd for business readiness and usage, respectively), using it extensively in its activities (52nd for extent of business usage) and to produce innovative products (35th for firm-level technology absorption and 47th for capacity for innovation)
However, the individual preparation and uptake of ICT remains very weak, at 113th and 95th, respectively. These points tie to the skills challenge discussed previously. According to the Report, this is attributable to poor educational standards in Science and Maths (136th), as well as to the very high access costs to ICT prevailing in the country—South Africa ranks 129th for residential monthly telephone subscriptions, and 107th, 102nd, and 79th for fixed telephone, mobile cellular, and fixed broadband Internet tariffs, respectively.
4. The Response to the Challenges
The South African Government has already begun a programme of ICT infrastructure investment and capacity expansion to address the challenges facing education in general, but higher education in particular.
5. South Africa’s Investments in ICT Infrastructure
In order to get ICT investment to deliver meaningfully to education, it is necessary that it be conceptualised holistically. That is to say, from the content creator to the learner’s desktop or mobile. Above everything, we have to use centres of higher learning as hubs of technology transfer.
Investment in infrastructure is therefore as crucial as investing in the end user devices that will be used to deliver the content. The South African Government has invested significantly in ICT infrastructure thus laying the foundation for investment in the second aspect of ICT supported learning, i.e. investment in end user devices and solutions. The Government has responded by investing through institutions such as Sentech, Broadband Infraco, the EASSy and WACS projects and the Square Kilometre Array project.
Sentech - Sentech is the Government owned telecommunications company that is building a National Wireless Broadband Network, focused on rural access. This hub of technology was spearheaded by the late Minister of Communications, Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, the first woman minister of the democratic Government. In her speech on policy decisions for ICT, she identified Sentech as a “strategicn national asset”.
The network will enable learning institutions located in rural areas to connect to each other and other institutions in order to exchange information and foster collaboration. Sentech has been allocated a budget of R 500 m for the rollout of this network. This is one of the first steps in closing the digital divide particularly between rural and urban communities.
Broadband Infraco - Broadband Infraco (BBI) is another Government owned entity in the ICT space. BBI is focused on providing transmission services to telecommunications network operators. BBI will be investing in upgrading its existing network, increasing the network’s capacity and reach. The upgraded network will provide a backbone for the Sentech broadband network. BBI has been allocated over R 300 m for the upgrade of its network. Together with Sentech the ICT infrastructure in South Africa will have been made ready for 21st century applications that require ubiquitous, high speed connectivity.
The Submarine Cable Projects (WACS and EASSy) - The Government is invested in the submarine cable projects coming down the East and the West coasts of Africa, through its interests in Telkom, Broadband Infraco and Neotel. These projects will create an additional eight (8) terabits of capacity for Southern Africa, over sixty times (60) the capacity available from the safe cable project, that preceded these two projects. The two projects will connect the African continent to the rest of world at high speeds.
This increased capacity will result in a reduction in the prices of broadband connectivity. This additional capacity when linked up with the broadband network being built by Sentech and the transmission network being built by Infraco, will mean that a rural facility in any of our provinces, can collaborate speedily, with a facility anywhere else in the world, at a tenth of the price and well over ten times the speed that they would have done five years ago.
South African National Research Network (SANReN)- SANReN is the national broadband connectivity network for public research institutions and universities and it is linked to international networks, such as GeANT.
The SANReN backbone will connect universities and public research organisations at a minimum speed of 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) over the next few years. It operates with local and regional initiatives such as TENET.
Access to high quality cyber infrastructure, makes it possible for South African researchers and scientists to find solutions to national and regional problems in a range of areas from health and energy to industrial innovations. It also makes possible large national science projects, such as South African Large Telescope (SALT), MeerKAT, Africa Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (ACCESS), International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, and National Bioinformatics Network.
The mandate of SANReN is to provide broadband connectivity to all public research institutions and universities. The existing network has connected institutions in metros. In 2010, the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Higher Education and Training collectively made available additional R150m to accelerate the roll-out of SANReN connectivity to rural and remotely located sites. It is anticipated that about 150 sites, including all rural based universities and the SKA and SALT sites will be connected by the end of the 2011 financial year.
Through SANReN connectivity, telemedicine is becoming easier for the world’s largest hospital, the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, while providing researchers with remote access to instruments such as the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope facility is possible.
SANReN also provides opportunities provision and access to quality teaching and learning, while lowering costs for universities.
Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) - The CHPC was launched in 2007 with the objective to build a world-class supercomputing facility for research, development and innovation. The centre hosts a core set of supercomputers with overall computing power of 50 Teraflops (TFlops) and a data centre with capacity of 0.5 Petabytes (PB) - ranked number one in Africa.
The commissioning of a Sun Microsystems hybrid supercomputer (29 TFlops) took South African high performance capabilities into the top 500 in the world.
Flagship projects of the CHPC are addressing challenges in diverse areas such as 3D visualisation, finance, epidemiology and computational biology. The CHPC has also established an Advanced Computer Engineering (ACE) laboratory to develop skills for local supercomputer architecture development. The ACE lab works very closely with the design team of KAT7/MeerKAT project being the demonstrator for South Africa’s bid to host the Square Kilometre Array Telescope.
Prof Phuti Ngoepe, Research Chair in Engineering at the University of Limpopo uses computational modelling techniques on the CHPC’s IBM cluster to complement experimental approaches in the study of high-power lithium ion rechargeable batteries for cars; which contributed to the building of South Africa’s first electric car, the Joule.
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) - The SKA is a radio telescope projects hosted by South Africa, located in the Karoo basin. The project will investigate key questions in Astronomy and Physics, leading to breakthroughs in our understanding of cosmos and its evolution. The SKA will generate massive volumes of data per day which will need to be communicated globally. The infrastructure investment already made by the Government will make it feasible for knowledge generated from the SKA to be shared globally.
Students in the Sciences at South African institutions will have access to world class and leading edge thinking as a result of the location of the SKA in Southern Africa.
The net outcome of all of this investment is that high learning institutions in South Africa have a network that allows for broadband connection from anywhere, no matter how remote, accessing vast volumes of information, on virtually any device.
6. An institution in the Cloud
With the infrastructural foundations that have been laid by government’s investment ICT infrastructure, we are now ready to conceive of a new kind of higher learning institution. While we are building additional brick-and-mortar institutions in some parts of our country, we are also investing in a new type of institution, an institution that can serve the whole country and if required, beyond the borders, through the use of technology.
Young people today are being exposed to new technology at younger and younger ages. All of the 23 Universities and 50 FET Colleges in South Africa,
provide email facilities for all registered students. The Department of Basic Education is starting the integration of technology into education at a very young age with the KidSmart Early Learning Programme for ages three to seven and the
Reading Companion Programme for ages five to seven. A mere glance of young people in the shopping centres, restaurants and other places of entertainment shows that they speak more on their mobile devices than they speak directly to each other.
We need to create new institutions that depend more on an infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ than an infrastructure ‘on the ground’. The phase of huge buildings, containing printing facilities, classrooms for lectures and paper-based libraries will end with the buildings and facilities we already have and the few new ones we will still build.
The new institution that we envisage will have a much smaller head-office. It will contract its educators from any location, using broadband connectivity. It will be managed on the basis of quality and performance and much less on physical space and facilities.
These new institutions will need to acquire learning materials and resources. The Internet provides us with unprecedented access to resources and materials used at institutions around the world called Open Educational Resources. By benefitting from those who have already facilitated learning in a particular subject, we can reduce the time it takes to prepare a course offering, and we can ensure higher quality of materials through an increase in the degree of electronic peer reviewing of the materials.
Learners, who are already in the habit of using social media, will appreciate the ability to use technologies that are familiar to them and to begin to contribute more to the learning process.
Each year learners will then be able to add to the learning materials, as will educators. In past years, we have lamented the high cost of ICTs and the low level of ICT literacy. Times are changing fast and I the displayed modern gadgets talk to the rapid drop in the cost of tablet computers, netbooks and mobile phones along with the dropping costs of broadband connectivity. These are the central learning devices of the present and future.
The new institutions we build will need to match the present technologies that learners use and that are commonplace in the workplace. Learning anywhere, at anytime is more of a reality now than ever before. To move towards the establishment of “institutions in the cloud”, we as South Africa would like to hear about and discuss innovative ways to implement Digital publishing and Open and Distance learning at all levels of postschool education in order to expand access to education at an accelerated rate to meet the demands and needs.
7. Intra-National Digital Divide And The Potential Of Mobile Phones
While we look forward to this new type of institution, we are also mindful of the reality in our current institutions and note that the potential of ICTs is squeezed between increasing pressure on higher education institutions from government to meet the social transformation and skills needs of South Africa, and the varying student academic preparedness, large size classrooms and multilingualism currently experienced in these teaching and learning contexts.
In the research of Czerniewicz and Brown of the University of Cape Town, it is indicated that on arrival at university, students will encounter the reality of a divide, an intra-national digital divide, with ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital strangers’
expected to engage in learning within the same classroom.
As Dr David Hollow has stated, from an article (Mobile bridges, intra-national divide) on the e-Learning Africa News Portal dated 18 April 2011: “Traditionally, there has always been a lot of concern about the digital divide that exists between Africa and the ‘developed’ world. This remains a significant challenge, but it is now accompanied by the reality of these equally damaging intra-national divides – for example, as experienced in the classroom dynamics of a university in South Africa.
The presence of an intra-national divide, exhibited within the classroom, poses the substantive challenge of how to build the appropriate pedagogical and technical bridges to facilitate effective learning for both groups of students” Czerniewicz and Brown have focused on the powerful capabilities of the mobile phone as a catalyst for students to move from digital strangers to digital natives. There are now 93 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in South Africa.
A 2010 survey of mobile phone users worldwide found that more than 90 percent of youth users in Nigeria, South Africa, and Indonesia, used mobile phones more often than desktop or laptop computers to access the Internet.
There has been much rhetoric about the potential of mobile telephones for educational purposes, but little evidence of impact or genuine education outcomes. This theoretical debate needs to move into the field of empirical evidence. For now, the challenge is to demonstrate how mobile learning can really be exploited and facilitate educational transformation. This is an area of investment that South Africa is keen to engage upon.
The investment areas outlined above, address the network readiness challenge. To address the skills and capacity challenge, efforts have been undertaken with regards to career guidance. It is by closing the gap between school and industry with appropriately directed youth, that South Africa will begin to close the developmental gap. ICT is being used to play a central role in this regard.
8. Career guidance
We are committed in making use of ICT to reach out to the most vulnerable learners country-wide, with relevant information regarding post-school applications and opportunities by mid-year 2012. With the assistance of the South African Qualifications Authority - SAQA, a multi-channel career advice services project has been established to provide a long term solution to make career guidance information freely available.
The project provides career advice via; amongst others, social media such as Twitter, Mixit and Facebook and a web site. Together with SAQA, the Department of Higher Education and Training is also building a fully-fledged web based career portal system that will provide users with guidance on learning pathways, course offerings, education service providers and a labour market information centre.
The department is working closely with other departments, such as the Department of Labour, and the Sector Education and Training Authorities to provide consolidated career advice services for the country. A key issue in career guidance is guiding more women into the ICT sector as well as encouraging them to use ICT to build their skills. The National Electronic Media Institute of SA and Satellite Applications has produced a number of female graduates in digital broadcasting, software and satellite applications.
What is needed more is these kinds of institutions that focus explicitly on development of women in ICT. The government has also n through the ICT sector charter, driven home the message that development of women within ICT companies in the country should enjoy priority.
9. Interface between learning and work
The final area that I wish to discuss today is the interface between the education institution and the workplace. Many of the professional areas of study combine course work at universities, universities of technology and Further Education, Vocational and Training institutions with structured learning at work. This is achieved by means of professional placements, work-integrated learning, apprenticeships, learner ships, internships, skills programmes, and work experience placements.
Professional, vocational, technical and academic (PIVOTAL) programmes are programmes which provide a full occupationally-directed qualification. Such courses will normally begin in a college or university and would include supervised practical learning in a workplace as part of their requirement.
The courses – especially for workers –could in some cases start in the workplace and then move to a college or university. The courses would culminate in an occupational qualification. In order to coordinate the opportunities for learning and workplace experience between business and education institutions, one can think of a number of innovative ICT applications that could operate in this space.
South Africa will be embarking on a period of innovation in both technology and processes, to ensure that all learners are provided with the necessary workplace experience to finalise their qualifications. This linking of learners to work, is a high priority area for Higher Education and Training in South Africa
and will see much attention in the coming years.
10. Conclusion
In conclusion, my contention is that effective utilisation of ICT tools in education, has a potential to enable our centres of higher education to play a crucial role in developing citizens, strengthening and deepening our democracy, the culture of
human rights and respect for the rule of law, attributes which are all pillars of a symbol of hope for citizens, sustainable development and growth.
ICT solutions offer unprecedented opportunities for the region and the continent to be connected through the cloud. They also offer us an opportunity to develop a pool of African scholars with a critical consciousness and competencies, urgently needed for the realisation of Nepad projects and the dream of
African Renaissance.
Through such dialogues, we should ask ourselves questions, such as the following:
- How to effectively deliver the last mile connectivity to our existing traditional brick education institutions, especially our FET colleges and rural based adult training centres;
- How to provide digital open content for our youth for varied learning programmes and learning abilities;
- How to link learners to learning opportunities and to improve the employment rate of learners who complete their studies, through the use of ICT applications;
- How to leverage mobile technology for demonstrable education outcomes and inclusivity;
- How do we consolidate our efforts toward a Pan-African virtual university that can absorb large numbers of learners both nationally and continent wide.
In closing, we have come far in our journey, but it is not yet at an end, to quote Nelson Mandela: “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not
to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
I have taken a moment to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended”.
I thank you.
