Powering ahead at UJ during a
THE University of Johannesburg is on track academically – in spite of disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic – and the 2020 examinations will go ahead as planned, said Vice-Chancellor Professor Tshilidzi Marwala.
He was speaking on the university’s transition to remote learning in the face of lockdowns and restrictions, which have impacted traditional campus life.
Marwala said he was concerned about sending students away when lockdown started, knowing that many would struggle with learning online.
“We decided to give all our students 30 gigabytes of data a month, to facilitate online learning. Then came the issue of access to devices, but we had a head start here because we had already given 40 percent of our students devices over the past three years. The whole project went very well, and in fact the pass rate in all our courses is on average four percent higher than last year,” he said.
In lockdown level 3 about 33 percent of the students, many of whom are from neighbouring states, returned to campus, but the entire student body is continuing to learn online.
The university is in the process of adjusting to level 2, which was announced earlier this month.
A strong focus of the university has been to ensure that students who have practicals, clinical practice, work-integrated learning or experiential learning are prioritised.
Marwala said he found it interesting that students were coming to online classes in greater numbers than they did to physical classes.
He said it was inconceivable that student life would go back to the way things were, and that blended learning – a mix of online and contact learning – was most likely, with the institution having to rethink its infrastructure going into the future.
Marwala, who has written extensively on the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), said all UJ students, regardless of what field they were studying in, had to take a course in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to equip them for this new future.
“A year from now, we will be firmly in the 4IR and will be using much more technology than ever before. This has been catalysed by Covid-19.”
He said the pandemic had also redefined UJ’s concept of an international student, where it was once about international students on campus, these days an international student could be anywhere in the world while studying digitally at UJ.
Drawing on the quote attributed to Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”, Marwala concluded: “I think that in higher education it is not the oldest that are going to survive, but rather those that are more adaptive to the changes around them that will. Covid-19 is probably here to stay, and we have to adapt, and reimagine the future.”