Be innovative about fees
T HE ANC is reeling from its loss of support during the local elections. One major constituency that turned its back on the ruling party was “clever blacks” – the insulting term Zuma used for emerging middle-class urban South Africans who could see through the rhetoric and manipulation of the ANC.
This is a precious group within our national landscape. It is where our future leaders, specialists, professionals, entrepreneurs and artisans will increasingly come from. We need to grow this group, not because they turned against the ANC, but because they are one of the most vital cogs for a flourishing South Africa.
The incubator for ‘clever blacks’ is our higher education system, currently the best in Africa and of high international standing, but under enormous strain. We know why.
The percentage of national income dedicated to higher education has continuously shrunk under the ANC while the numbers entering have continuously increased. The only surprise is that the crisis took so long to fully manifest.
Universities cannot claim innocence here. Vice-chancellors taking home over R2 million a year are only the symbolic head of the problem.
Our universities failed to innovate. Never before has it been cheaper to access or produce high-quality programmes using the latest education technologies, but there has been hardly any uptake of these innovations within higher education.
It is possible to produce high-quality video lessons that have built-in feedback mechanisms that keep track of how students are doing. We call them Moocs (massive open online courses).
These can be watched any time, anywhere, and enable students who are struggling to spend extra time engaging with a visual and oral medium that assists learning in an interactive way. It’s not a silver bullet, but there has been an exponential explosion of development within this e-learning sphere over the last 10 years.
Go to any university in the country and ask a lecturer what a Mooc is, and chances are you will get a blank stare. Universities are supposed to be places of innovative forward thinking, of cutting-edge development.
Instead they have become places where austerity logics rule, and any mention of innovation is dismissed because its start-up costs are too expensive, never mind what future cost savings would be.
Why are we not using the cellphone almost every student has in their hands as a part of their education?
When disruptions happen, why can we not refer them to the online version of the course to keep going? In a country where we are trying to increase access to higher education, why are we not using the learning technologies that precisely enable increased access at reduced cost?
I am caught in an unusual position, where I feel disgust for the government’s failure to appreciate the scale of the higher education crisis, and disgust for our universities, with all their ‘clever academics’, who have failed to innovate in the face of this crisis.
Radical
Our universities needed to be far more radical in their responses, but all that has happened is a slow whittling away of capacity due to austerity measures.
This simply kicks the bucket down the road. But the king of all bucket kickers is the ANC government. How could it not have budgeted for an increase in higher education funding after the student protests of last year?
Did they think the students would go away, give up, somehow find the money they do not have?
Increasing taxes is an obvious route to find the funding, but those being taxed are sickened by how the ANC government is wasting money, and further taxation feels like further wastage.
We could do a future tax, where students pay for their fees once they get a job, but where do we get money for 2016, not 2026? This is where the scent of revolution hits the air.
The current government cannot deal with the crisis in a sustained way and the people in revolt are clever enough to know this, and determined to have a future better than what the current dispensation is capable of delivering.
But it is also this group of people who we need to ensure are properly educated, for it is they who will provide the future growth of our country, and it is these protests that directly threaten this educational process.
But with an external revolution hanging in the air, there has been a singular internal failure of our university sector to deal with its own internal revolution happening as we speak, where its current lecturing model of teaching and learning has become rapidly outdated and inefficient due to massive innovation within education technologies.
And ironically, this internal revolution within e-learning could help the external revolution we face, only we are too battered and exhausted with austerity measures to notice.
Professor Wayne Hugo teaches education at UKZN.