Hon Mr Justice BM Ngoepe, Chancellor of Unisa,
Hon Mr M Masina, Dep Minister of Trade and Industry,
Members of Diplomatic Corps,
The Delegation from Gambia, and
Members of Council, Management and staff of Unisa
Good evening and thank you for inviting me. I look forward to participating in the awards later on.
I want to begin by reflecting on what we have achieved in higher education so far.
We have increased and expanded participation in higher education. There has been a huge expansion in the number of women studying in higher education. And there has been a welcome internationalisation of the student body, with over 80,000 international students at our universities.
We have established a national quality assurance framework and infrastructure and each university is now subject to a quality audit, which has significantly raised quality issues across the sector.
We have introduced a new funding framework that is goal oriented and performance related. We have adopted a multi-faceted approach to the funding of higher education that includes a combination of targeted funding aimed at the expansion of the system, the production of skilled graduates and enhancing the capacity of the system to deal with the increasing student numbers.
We have begun the process of transforming our universities from insular institutions to open institutions for all.
The aim of the merger process mandated in 2002 was to break up the division between black and white institutions, to improve quality through economies of scale, and to improve staff-student ratios.
Yet transformation is an ongoing process and we need to plan ahead.
A strong case must be made for more diverse higher education institutional types that are able to meet appropriate quality benchmarks and satisfy particular labour markets.
In pursuing differentiation as a policy, we must be strategic. Not all universities can be research intensive. This does not mean the relegation of some higher education institutions to a second-class status.Even if your core mandate is teaching, universities are encouraged to engage in focussed research.
In the latest R&D survey (2012/13) there was a real and nominal increase in the R&D spend (following the contraction in the two consecutive years, 2009/10 and 2010/11). The higher education sector was the biggest contributor to that increase. And that's where UNISA made an important contribution.
I must emphasise that distance education is important not only in South African for in Africa as well, as it expands higher education opportunities to those sectors of society that are not reached through traditional contact education. It provides second-chance access to higher education and learning opportunities to students who, for one reason or another, cannot be reached by full-time contact education. These students include working adults and professionals seeking to upgrade their qualifications.
Africa is rated the lowest in the world in terms of student participation rate.
It is in this regard that the role of open learning and distance education is crucial as it broadens the base for enrolments and participation in higher education.
Advances in technology are changing not only the distance education sector but traditional universities as well. What are the odds on the survival of lectures as a mode of transferring knowledge over the next ten years?
Besides the need to expand the provision of higher education, there are other challenges that confront the development of open and distance education in Africa. These relate to issues such as low student success and completion rates, and more unfortunately, the persistent perceptions by some members of the public that distance education is of low or inferior quality in comparison to contact education. These may be mere perceptions, but we need to deal with them if ever we are to lend credibility and respectability to distance education as a viable alternative to contact education.
In promoting quality in distance education, we should pay attention to a whole range of issues. These include academic qualifications of staff to ensure that lecturers or facilitators are of desirable and acceptable standard; the supply of facilities such as laboratories; curriculum development and the design of course materials etc. We must make sure that by making course material accessible to students, we do not lose or compromise on the quality imperative.
Most importantly, we should make sure that our overall objective of establishing a quality assurance body is to achieve international best practice, and to develop open learning and distance education to a level of acceptability by all in the system.
All universities need intellectual leadership.
Are youdoing enough to build a new generation of intellectualsat UNISA?
You know that we need to expand our science system and to do this we need a new generation of intellectuals in our universities.
Government is on your side. Assisting in that task is not up to the Department of Science and Technology (DST) alone. The Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) has also invested in the next generation within a framework of institutional enrolment plans, new blood lectureships, and incentives to universities to produce research outputs in the form of publications and master's and doctoral graduates. For example, the funding subsidy weight for doctoral graduates is three times that for master's graduates and publication units, as an incentive to universities to increase doctoral graduates. In addition, the formula provides financial support to universities still developing their research capacity.
There can be no doubt that these incentives have contributed to the doubling of South African publications in journals accredited by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) over the 2005-2012 period, and they may also be contributing to the increase in doctoral graduate output although the anecdotal evidence is that senior academics find it more lucrative to publish rather than to teach PhDs.
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is also part of the charge to train the next generation of academics. The DTI initiated the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme (THRIP), which is aimed at producing high-level skills in industry-relevant projects, partly funded by industry.
It's not enough. We have to do more for the next generation.
Let me leave you with this concern about the next generation - not enough blacks, not enough South African blacks, and not enough women are going to be part of that new generation.
In terms of race, a significantly lower proportion of the total number of African students is enrolling for postgraduate study than is the case for whites.
In terms of gender, proportionally fewer women enrol for master's and doctoral studies than men.
In terms of foreign african students, their proportion grew at a much faster rate than South African Africans for the past six to eight years.
It's imperative that effective interventions be devised to attract more South African black (African) students into postgraduate research degrees –and ultimately into research and/or academic careers. We have plans in the DST, there are plans in DHET, and I hope there are well laid plans in UNISA as well.
