How education has changed in South Africa – and what students want teachers to know

 ·22 Oct 2022

The Covid pandemic has reminded institutions of higher learning to revisit their curricula with a view to engage with deep programme reform in order to remain relevant, says professor Ahmed Shaikh, MD of Regent Business School.

Professor Shaikh said educators find themselves in a changing world wherein the rate of change, uncertainty and flux is without precedent. He said higher education was already facing deep challenges before the pandemic, largely because of the impact of exponential and disruptive technologies, and those challenges have been compounded by the lasting impacts of a global pandemic.

Individuals from various institutions were invited to express their views at the Southern African Association for Institutional Research (SAAIR) Quality Forum with the theme: “New Innovations in Teaching and Learning: Do these innovations lead to quality teaching and learning?”

Lerato Makuapane, a research and project coordinator of the Analytics and Institutional Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, touched on staff experiences of how they coped with the adaptation, abandoning the ‘old’ and familiar for a new way of teaching under Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT).

“Work and life balance together with much higher workloads appeared to be a major challenge, and while a range of previously under-utilised technology enablers were introduced into the Teaching and Learning (T&L) environment, a key success factor in the T&L process had been lost – the human interaction.

“Of course, the pandemic became a double-edged sword, in some respects, as it took such a catastrophic phenomenon to force all of us to adopt and accept technology as a vital medium in the T&L process, but at the cost of person-to-person connections that are part of our hardwiring,” she said.

Dr Carin Stoltz-Urban, the quality assurance manager for Teaching and Learning at the Inscape Education Group, shared some interesting insights from her institution on how they have strengthened the student and academic relationship through technology with a strong emphasis on staff development, mentioning that an effective approach has been to introduce Continuous Professional Development (CPD) in a non-threatening manner through communities of practice.

Hoosen Essof, the redHUB and operations manager at Regent Business School, drew close attention to the traits required for the future world of work and the tension between realistic expectations of students and what can be achieved through the curriculum.

Essof’s presentation also reminded the participants of the value and importance of work-integrated learning and how to think differently about traditional approaches to internships.

Dr Kirti Menon, a senior director of the Division for Teaching Excellence at the University of Johannesburg, stressed that technology is not the driver of the curriculum and related pedagogy but is rather an enabler, stating that we now have the opportunity as we emerge from the pandemic to reflect deeply and intentionally on how technology can be used to shift the way we teach and the way students learn.

Students who attended the event highlighted the disparity between their backgrounds and levels of preparedness for the remote teaching environment.

They also highlighted that the levels of anxiety experienced under remote teaching conditions were a significant challenge that placed a huge strain on their own mental health and well-being.

Students underscored the need to train the teachers – specifically in terms of assessment methodologies and, more importantly, to facilitate these with students.

They also raised questions on the need to reflect on how learning may occur rather than following the old familiar path of memory retention under timed conditions, which yield little benefit. The students closed the discussion by saying that institutions have so much to learn from one another and that they should be open to sharing these with one another.


Read: How schools have changed in South Africa, according to a headmaster – and what parents need to know

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