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19 May 2020 | Story Cornelius Hagenmeier and Prof Colin Chasi | Photo Supplied
Cornelius Hagenmeier.
Africa is defined by colonial borders, within which states attempt to build viable systems. Universities are a significant part of the national innovation systems that seek to change the socio-economic and other fortunes of the many poor and marginalised Africans. As Africa approaches the celebrations on the occasion of the 57th anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the COVID-19 crisis reveals – if we are willing to see it – that there is a need to focus much attention on intra-Africa internationalisation programmes for African higher education.

Because national socio-economic and health systems are often inadequate, Covid-19 protects unprecedented human and social suffering for many on the continent. To try and stave off this harm throughout the continent, borders have been closed and economies have been stifled. Except for the ‘repatriation’ of citizens, international travel has become all but impossible. Africans have, as never before, been bound to colonial boundaries, which are preserved according to a principle called uti-possidetis. This principle was reluctantly ratified by members of the Organisation of African Union (OAU) in July 1964. This ratification was reluctant, because leaders recognised that African boundaries were arbitrarily and chaotically imposed in the scramble for Africa. These borders were not developed by internal historical processes. In consequence, they divide kith from kin, limiting trade and commerce across the continent. Nevertheless, leaders adopted the uti-possidetis principle for fear that allowing the contestation of these borders would likely yield territorial wars that would bring heightened misery without end. 

State power in Africa today is exercised within postcolonial borders that continue to be weak and porous. It is also exercised by states that are themselves generally weak. These states take their health-promoting actions to neighbourhoods that often have inadequate socio-economic and health systems for combating COVID-19. They entrap us in compartments that produce lives that are short and brutish.  We would do well to ask how we can decolonise our borders in ways that set us free to change socio-economic fortunes.

Within the confining arrangements of state power, the health threat of the COVID-19 pandemic has been met with almost every African country adopting stringent health precautions, often resulting in sudden, sharp economic declines. With this, the livelihoods of millions are in jeopardy. African higher education has not escaped the resultant challenges.
The higher education sector is struggling to adapt. To be sure, in many ways, it is producing mighty work. Many books and journals will write about how systems moved significant aspects of teaching and learning online, often with great success, sometimes with great frustrations. At the same time, Africans rightly expect higher education systems to contribute to finding immediate responses to the pandemic threat. In many cases, universities are assisting by researching the coronavirus genome, developing effective and cost-efficient necessities such as personal protective equipment and ventilators; or by researching effective vaccines, medication, and public-health interventions. However, it is difficult to find excellent examples of how these steps are changing national narratives, particularly those that bind us to colonial miseries.

The African Union (AU), which is the successor to the OAU, is trying to build multilateral efforts. It has developed an ‘Africa Joint Continental Strategy for COVID-19 Outbreak’ and established an ‘Africa Taskforce for Coronavirus’. These efforts seek to foster collaboration between multilateral stakeholders. For the African Union recognises that to adequately address the crises occasioned by COVID-19, it is necessary that member states, African Union agencies, the World Health Organization and other partners work synergistically to avoid duplication and to maximise efficiencies, given that resources are extremely constrained. 

A central tenet of the OAU is African solidarity. Member states have undertaken to coordinate and intensify their cooperation and efforts to achieve a better life for the people of Africa. It is encouraging that the AU’s Chairperson, President Cyril Ramaphosa, refers to pan-Africanist ideas when he calls for the ‘strengthening of the bonds of solidarity that exist between us as Africans’ (24 April 2020). Ideas of African togetherness, underpinned by the philosophy of ubuntu, must inspire African solidarity. They are more relevant than ever before. 

It is vital that we think, beyond this COVID-19 crisis, of how long-run coordination of African higher education institutions in Africa must produce continent-wide systems of innovation that take us out of perpetual poverty, disease, and unnecessary deaths.

African higher education is struggling to define its place in the rapidly changing realities of the continent. Many institutions are driven to merely concentrate on how they will survive, or on how sprouting areas of excellence will make it through adverse financial conditions that emerge. 

Africa is at a critical juncture. How we make it through COVID-19 and what we learn from doing so, will determine whether Africa unites as we shape the post-COVID-19 future.

Prof Colin Chasi. (Photo: Anja Aucamp.) 

Periods of great strife, devastation, and hardship are opportunities for radical renewal and quantum leaps in development. But we must have the courage to take those opportunities. If we have the courage to unleash our universities in the kinds of continent-changing work that is needed, the fortunes of African countries are, after all,  tied together (no matter what colonial boundaries and divisions may say). 

The decisions that will be made during and in the wake of the pandemic will determine whether the crisis and its aftermath will allow the continent to focus on becoming a prospering, united world power, or whether national egoism (tied to colonial histories) will prevail and hinder sustainable development. 

How African higher education evolves in the post-pandemic world will largely depend on whether universities will be able to embrace the interconnectedness and interdependency of Africa’s social and economic realities. African higher education systems must escape the temptation to respond to immediate challenges in isolation. These times should teach us that when your neighbour catches the flu, your home economy suffers too. However, where people should observe social distancing to overcome the flu, economies must reach across borders if they are to flourish in markets large enough to truly impart value to ideas, services, and goods.

Higher education should serve African people by advancing social transformation and development through collaboration in skills development and research. Through intra-African partnerships and collaborations, African universities can make significant contributions to finding responses to the peculiar public health and medical challenges of emerging African societies and shaping a prosperous and unified post-pandemic Africa.

Many African higher education institutions excel in specific fields. The quality of programmes and research is not uniform throughout institutions. We need to lead the world in recognising each other’s strengths to produce intensified collaboration in capacity development and research. In doing this work, higher education will go far beyond repeating and mimicking colonial patterns, or if you wish, it will go beyond colonial boundaries. It will be a key driver in finding responses to the cross-cutting challenges that need to be resolved to fulfil the aspirations of Africa’s Agenda 2063. Indeed, by leveraging the complementary strengths of its higher education institutions, the continental higher education system could become a critical force shaping a positive post-COVID-19 African reality. Pan-Africanism in higher education should not be limited to isolated initiatives such as the development of the Pan-African University, but should establish a framework for sustained continental academic collaboration.  

As African universities prepare to contribute to the celebrations for the 57th anniversary of the OAU, they should consider how they can strengthen intra-African collaboration to achieve the pan-African vision of ‘an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens, representing a dynamic force in the international arena’ (AU vision statement). 

Fortunately, there are excellent points of departure. Laudable programmes such as the Association of African Universities staff exchange programme already exist, yet much of the intra-African higher education collaboration is still financed by foreign donors. The African Union, African governments, and the African higher education sector influence the structure of those programmes through consultation, and consequently minimise the risk of them responding to the international perceptions of African needs rather than real African needs. This should be strengthened, not least through committing equity to the formulation of joint programmes. 

For the brave new world in which we must make space for our children to thrive, brave new African frameworks for collaboration should be developed. Energy must be invested in removing obstacles to African higher education collaboration. Some of the things that need to be done are well known. Practical measures could include strengthening the harmonisation of African higher education accreditation and quality assurance mechanisms, establishing an African credit recognition and transfer system, and fast-tracking the harmonisation of African higher education programmes. The celebration of 2020 Africa Day should encourage African higher education to work towards devising a strategy for strengthening collaboration, which would assist the continent in shaping a positive post-COVID-19 African reality. If this can be achieved, African universities could emerge as genuine agents of achieving solidarity and development in post-pandemic Africa, and thus realising the ideals of the OAU.

News Archive

Former top politician talks at UFS School of Management
2007-04-25

Dr Matthews Phosa, the non-executive chairman of EOH and former politician, presented a guest lecture to a group of MBA students at the University of the Free State's (UFS) School of Management. At the lecture were from the left: Mr Tate Makgoe (Free State MEC for Finance), Ms Nontobeko Scheppers (MBA student), Dr Phosa, Prof. Helena van Zyl (Director: UFS School of Management) and Mr Setjhaba Tlhatlogi (MBA student).
Photo: Stephen Collett

Exploring some of the myths and opportunities cyber space offers

Mathews Phosa

Introduction

It is no longer business as usual. Globalisation poses new challenges as well as opportunities to business, education and society in general. Many of these new opportunities are alive with paradoxes and tensions between local sustainability and global market opportunities. The growth in new communication technologies challenges us to critically explore some popular myths, opportunities and define possible responses.

Cyberspace is often described as the new frontier – not only in the race for newer and faster technologies, but also in education. Any user or provider of services who does not explore this new frontier will soon be considered using “outdated” and will be accused of using obsolete methodologies. Cyberspace, like the spaces embodied in continents, is something that should be claimed and conquered.

Cyberspace and specifically access to information, including online education is hailed as the great equaliser. It is now claimed that everyone will have equal access to “Knowledge”. Cyber education  for example is celebrated as “education-without-borders”, but as Bauman states, while it does change borders and access, it creates new “haves” and “have-nots”.

 

To put it in a nutshell:  rather than homogenizing the human     condition, the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distance tends to polarize it.  It emancipates certain humans from territorial constraints and renders certain community-generating meanings     exterritorial – while denuding the territory, to which other people go on being confined, of its meaning and its identity-endowing capacity.
(Bauman 1989:18; emphasis mine).

Virtual environments and the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web are new spaces that are being colonised and occupied by those who have capital (whether economic or academic) and who are looking for new labour or markets.  While the new mediums include and conquer new spaces, it also excludes and “otherises” communities and segments of society (Prinsloo 2005).  Cyberspace provides institutions and corporations with a space to operate without the responsibilities and obligations of locality – as long as you can afford the privilege of operating in cyberspace.

Cyberspace is therefore not neutral.  Spaces are occupied, reoccupied, abandoned, claimed, fortified, secured – contested.  Those with mobility define and map spaces continuously according to their claims.  Those without capital and the mobility it brings, contest these claims, contest the spaces and hack into the space.  Reclaim it.  Recolonise it.

 

Re-Appropriating Cyberspace

A number of authors explores such a re-appropriation of cyberspace.  Instead of seeing the Internet and related functions like online teaching as just accessing and transferring information, cyberspace is explored as political, social, personal and economic space.  Institutions across the spectrum including higher education institutions venturing into cyberspace often think that it offers them a space without the usual socio-cultural complexities. Gunn, McSporran, Macleod and French (2003:14) however indicate that online “interactions that take place through electronic channels lose none of the socio-cultural complexity or gender imbalance that exists within society”.

Instead of cyberspace being a new space where the differences and disparities of non-virtual life on earth cease to exist, “cyberspace is an imagined network layer sitting on top of the physical infrastructure of cities. Cyberspace is an imagined, continuous, worldwide, networked city; the global city that never sleeps, always experienced in real time” (Irvine 1999, Online). Cyberspace therefore not only sits on top of the physical infrastructure, but is also a mirror image of the power structures and disparities of non-virtual life on earth.

Cyberspace is also much more than just a replication of non-virtual reality. New subcultures and new self-defined communities are coming into existence (Irvine 1999, Online).  These new communities in cyberspace resemble communities in non-virtual format, but they are also vastly different.  For example, Grierson (Online) explores the similarities between cemeteries and the communities in cyberspace.  She finds that, although both “communities” are constituted in space, it is a “placeless place” which “links and mirrors society, with all its alter-egos and hidden desires … a virtual site holding up a mirror to physical reality where subjective presence is delineated in imaginary absence”.

The Internet as “sites for power and knowledge” is further explored by a number of authors, amongst othersNewman and Johnson (1999), Usher (2002), Walmsley (2000) and Borer (Online). Jordan (1999, Online) investigates culture and politics in cyberspace.  He explores three “intertwined levels”, namely cyberspace as “playground of the individual”, as “social space, a place where communities exist” and as “being a society or even a digital nation”.  In each of these three levels, power is played out and claimed in a “sociological, cultural, economic and political battle between the individual and a technopower elite”.

The so-called impact of the Internet on society is discounted by Bennet (2001:197).  He suggests rather that the Internet “should be regarded as a “form of life – whose evolving structure becomes embedded in human consciousness and social practice, and whose architecture embodies an inherent valence that is gradually shifting away from the assumptions of anonymity upon which the Internet was originally designed” (2001:197).

We started by stating that it is no longer business as usual. We can no longer afford epistemologies of ignorance and politeness. Cyberspace and the opportunities it offers for business, society and education in particular need to be interrogated using a hermeneutics of suspicion, confronting certain myths, exploring opportunities and defining appropriate responses.

It is evident that the impact of the cyberspace stretches across the total spectrum of the human experience and condition.  Due to the complexity of discussing the total spectrum of options this discussion focuses on Higher Education as one entity to demonstrate the implications and level of reflection required.
To come to terms with some of theses realities it is necessary to address some of the typical myths. The following aspects provide an indication of some of the myths:

  • Myth 1 - Access. The Internet and online education is not the great equaliser. Access to the Internet on a sustainable and affordable basis is still for the rich and the privileged. There is good reason to celebrate the widening access citizens have to the Internet. In the last number of years the so-called “digital-divide” has indeed decreased. It is however still disputable that having access to the World Wide Web changes lives for the better. For the World Wide Web to deliver on its promise of changing society into more just and compassionate communities, the other divides in society have to be addressed as well.
  • Myth 2 - Quality of information available. Even when/if sustainable and affordable access to the Internet would be available to all; the overwhelming quantity of information on the Internet would require participants to have critical information literacies. Such literacies will be crucial in allowing the “having access to more information” to really allow participants to live differently. Bauman (1989) and others warn of the increasing commodification and consumerisation of knowledge; the immense amounts of information available on the Web, results in information and knowledge becoming “cheap”, and un-validated.  
  • Myth 3 – The role of race and gender. Current research indicates that the unequal socio-economic gender relations are perpetuated in cyberspace. Females have less access and often less frequent access due to prescribed and patriarchally perpetuated life-roles. Research also indicates that males frequently dominate online discussions, often relegating female participants to roles of quiet observer. In this “neutrality” of cyberspace the assumption often is that gender should not matter in a space where identity is often just a name and a short introduction. There is however enough research to validate the role identity and specifically race and gender play in online learning environments.
  • Myth 4 – Guaranteed success as learning platform. International research indicates that very few students opt for fully online learning. Even in countries where access to online environments are either state-sponsored or very cheap, learners do not prefer online learning to more face-to-face learning environments. Students seem to prefer a range of blended learning experiences, rather than fully online. This has impacted on several world-class universities forcing them to cancel fully online offerings. Fully online learning and interaction require specific literacies and personality traits of participants. Online learning is not a “one size fits all”.

 

Research in South Africa indicates that many learners use computers at work to access their learning environments. Not only does this impact on productivity, but learners therefore do not have access to their online learning environments over weekends and when they prepare for the examination. Employers also increasingly block mass-generated electronic correspondence from universities and limit learners’ access to the Internet. This results in learners experiencing growing frustrations with “fire-walls” that do not allow an effective learning environment.

Very few learners are sufficiently prepared to engage and sustain their own learning in a fully online environment. Institutions offering online learning are often inundated with requests for more support, often face-to-face.

  • Myth 5 - Quality in an online learning environment. At present there are no quality indicators specifically focused on online learning environments in higher education. The quality of the current offerings  range from “drop-off and go” experiences where students carry the cost of printing materials with very little continued support and interaction from the side of the institution, to very intensive online teaching which overestimates the time and resources that students have for such learning.
  • Myth 6 - Accountability.  Many overseas institutions offer online qualifications in other countries without any guarantee that the qualifications will be accredited by local institutions of learning or employers. Many students wrongfully belief that because it is offered by an international provider using online, that the learning experience will be of a high quality and that it will be accredited by local education institutions and employers.
  • Myth 7 - Global is better. Though there is a legitimate trend to ensure internationalisation in education, the need for contextual, local and authentic learning remains equally important. The challenges learners face are often context-specific and international tutors in online environments often have very little understanding for the cultural and socio-economic specificities of local contexts. Some metaphors and examples often used in online environments exclude participants from non –western cultures to fully comprehend and apply the learning to their own contexts.
  • Myth 8 - Online teaching and learning is ideologically neutral. All curricula arise from context specific ideological and socio-economic relations and epistemologies. Very few institutions foreground their specific beliefs and assumptions about knowledge and learning. This is even more so applicable in online learning environments where the “designers” of the learning are often even more hidden than in face-to-face contexts.

Opportunities

The Internet does however offer scores of opportunities for institutions of higher learning to seriously consider. The following is but a few of the opportunities that await careful and critical consideration.

  • Opportunity 1 - Reaching the un-reached. Yes, online teaching and learning bring opportunities to many learners who have been previously excluded from training, development and higher education. The reach of higher education does not only entail those who were previously excluded, but also brings into reach qualifications at internationally renowned institutions.
  • Opportunity 2 - Access to information. With the Internet, students have access to the most recent, cutting-edge information. Students will increasingly be able to compile their own curricula and have it validated by institutions of higher learning. Students now have access to the international discourses in the different disciplines at the click of a mouse. While there is a real danger that not all students have (yet) the critical literacies required by the Information age and secondly that they may be overwhelmed and become lost in cyberspace.
  • Opportunity 3 - Communication. With the Internet and other mobile communication technologies, learners can increasingly be in touch with institutions of learning and educators and peers. Learning experiences can be enriched by synchronous and asynchronous communication, between the institution and tutors, tutors among themselves, between tutors and learners and among learners themselves. Online learning really open up a Habermasian “public sphere” for “communicative action”.
  • Opportunity 4 - Mode 3 knowledge-production. Traditionally knowledge production in higher education focused on discipline specific transfer of knowledge, called mode 1 knowledge production. Paulo Freire called this “banking education” (1989). Recent years saw the development of Mode 2 knowledge production where knowledge was applied and arose from practical application to appropriate problem-spaces. Online learning environments make it increasingly possible to move to Mode 3 knowledge production where learners address problem-space from the foundations of a specific discipline but then continue to explore contributions from a range of other disciplines Knowledge production has moved form “knowing-how” to “knowing-in-the-world”. Barnett refers to this change as an “ontological turn” (2005).

The changing role of higher education

It will be naïve and irresponsible for higher education not to interrogate popular notions and epistemologies of online education and the role of the Internet. We have explored a number of myths and (hopefully) created sufficient suspicion to invite further discourse. We have also explored a number of opportunities an online environment offers to business, higher education and society in general.

Higher education has to indeed decrease the “digital divide” not only in the form of broadening access, but also by seriously interrogating the accompanying epistemologies. From the above it would seem as if a responsible and robust response would entail the following:

  • Response 1 - Empower learners with critical literacies for the information age. having access to the information the Internet offers will challenge higher education institutions and learners alike to be able to critically evaluate information and its sources. While addressing access may in fact decrease the digital divide but it is worthless if the decrease in the digital divide does not and cannot result in students’ critical engagement with information and with one-another.
  • Response 2 - Increase access to the Internet through collaborative agreements. Higher education institutions have much more bargaining power than individual learners. It is almost unbelievable that with the “captive audiences” higher education institutions have, that they have not been successful to negotiate more affordable and sustainable access to online environments.
  • Response 3 – Develop quality online learning. Higher education should be very clear about the minimum standards for learning platforms, opportunities for peer and tutor interaction and the sustaining of a teacher presence in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs).
  • Response 4 – Maintain scholarly online teaching. Higher education should encourage research, individual and collaborative projects to determine the indicators of success of online learning in specific contexts for specific audiences.
  • Response 5 – Higher education as critical praxis.  Higher education traditionally has validated all claims to knowledge and expertise. As Barnett (2000, 2005) has indicated, higher education is no longer the only “producers of knowledge”. However, higher education still has the mandate to validate knowledge, whether claimed or made available in cyberspace. Higher education has the unique opportunity to rise to the occasion and to interrogate knowledge claims. The opportunities should be considered in the context of the realities of cyberspace as discussed.  Fundamental to this is the fact that it requires higher education to increase the capacity of students for critical and compassionate action to assist in the formation and utilisation of the challenges and new opportunities.  Essentially the challenge is to create opportunities and empower students and the broader society to utilise the potential cyberspace towards a more just and equitable society.

In Conclusion

There are a number of myths surrounding online education and the impact of the Internet on business, education and development. Only once cyber space has been demythologised, it is then that our eyes open to the opportunities that it offers. Higher education is therefore called upon to reflexively exploit the opportunities online learning and the Internet offer to engaging one another in learning experiences. Higher education will do well to take both the myths and the opportunities seriously and courageously.

Cyberspace is a new frontier. As previously done with colonial frontiers, this frontier can be exploited ruthlessly. There is however also an opportunity for business and higher education to engage with cyberspace – and use cyberspace to create hospitable, nourishing environments for active learning and a more just and equitable society for all.

References

  • Barnett, R. 2000. University knowledge in an age of supercomplexity. Higher Education 40:409-422.
  • Barnett, R. 2005. Recapturing the universal in the university. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37(6):785-797.
  • Bauman, Z.1998. Globalization. The human consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Bennet, CJ. 2001. Cookies, web bugs, webcams and cue cats: patterns of surveillance on the World Wide Web. Ethics and Information Technology 3:197-210.
  • Borer, MI. The Cyborgian self: toward a critical social theory of cyberspace. Available URL:
  • http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/borer.htm (accessed on 10/04/2007).
  • Freire, P. 1989. Learning to question: a pedagogy of liberation. Geneva: World Council of Churches.
  • Gunn, C, McSporran, M, Macleod, H & French, S. 2003. Dominant or different? Gender issues in computer support learning. JALN 7(1):14-30.
  • Grierson, EM. From cemeteries to cyberspace: identity and a globally technologised age. Available URL: Click here!
  • (accessed on 10/04/2007).
  • Irvine, M. 1999. Global cyber culture reconsidered: cyberspace, identity and the global informational city. Available URL: http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/articles/globalculture.html
  • (accessed on 10/04/2007).
  • Jordan, T. 1999. Cyberpower: the culture and politics of cyberspace. Available URL:
  • http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/3i/3i_1.htm (accessed on 10/04/2007).
  • Newman, R & Johnson, F. 1999. Sites of power and knowledge? Towards a critique of the virtual university. British Journal of Sociology of Education 20(1):79-88.
  • Prinsloo, P. 2005. Don Quixote in cyberspace – charging at the invisible. Open and Distance learning in Africa Number 1, 2006: 78-94.
  • Usher, R. 2002. Putting space back on the map: globalisation, place and identity. Educational Philosophy and Theory 43(1):2002.
  • Walmsley, DJ. 2000. Community, place and cyberspace. Australian Geographer 31(1):5-19.

 

 

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