The politics of e-learning in South African higher education (original) (raw)

2007, International Journal of Education and …

The notion of e-learning, commonly understood as 'learning facilitated online through network technologies' (Garrison & Anderson, 2003), has emerged across South African higher education institutions since the 1990s. As in other national contexts, e-learning practices appear together with an entirely new vocabulary, institutional policies and structures, and substantial institutional budgets. E-learning also appears as one of many ICT-enhanced practices in universities from the provision of e-mail, online journals, and networked libraries, to the development of creative software solutions for information management tasks in teaching, research and all sorts of institutional administrative systems for online registration, finance, human resources, student performance data, course evaluations and so on. The new practices have provoked a range of issues around online pedagogies, patterns of access and of exclusion, increasing ICT costs in the context of unequal resources and competing institutional priorities, and the relation of e-learning practices to other institutional interventions seeking to transform the colonial fabric and cultures of South African higher education institutions. It is therefore useful to view ICTs as 'one thread in a complex net of transformation, including historical redress, curriculum transformation, diversity, equity and so on' (Czerniewicz, Ravjee & Mlitwa, 2006: 43). Organisationally, the emergence of full-scale 'digital universities', such as the African Virtual University (Juma, 2003), which involves more than 30 higher education institutions from 17 African countries, and the increasing use of online learning in contact universities, are seen to blur the traditional distinctions between distance-mode and contact-mode institutions (Butcher 2003: 13-19). Butcher suggests that these kinds of 'dual-mode' institutions are increasing in developing countries. The universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria as two clear examples in South Africa, where the number of 'distance' students enrolled in traditionally 'contact' institutions increased by almost 500% between 1993 and 1999, particularly in the historically Afrikaans language universities (Jansen, 2004: 303).