Chapter 3

Strategic Challenges for the South African Higher Education System

 Introduction 

This document has presented a series on interlinked arguments that relate to the common theme of ICTs and higher education in South Africa. We have attempted to develop a conceptual and strategic line of thinking that provides a clear platform for understanding how best to harness ICT applications to contribute to creating and maintaining an effective higher education system. In this final section of the document, we attempt to draw this together by summarizing what we consider to be the most pertinent points for the CHE Task Team on the Size and Shape of Higher Education. Although some points may appear generalized and unsubstantiated if read in isolation, we believe that everything below is supported by the arguments developed at length above. 

 The central arguments 

1. ICTs themselves have no intrinsic capacity for action, and hence cannot impact on anything. Rather, people all around theworld can and do apply ICTs to perform a wide – and growing – range of tasks. However, reflections on the impact of ICT cannot be limited to how ‘we’ use those technologies. The way in which other people, other organizations, other countries use ICTs is as likely to have an impact on us as how we use the technologies. Thus, on the one hand, South African higher education cannot simply behave as if technological developments are not occurring nor can it not respond to the challenges of how to use ICTs effectively, because to do so is to leave the higher education system vulnerable to ways in which other organizations in South Africa and elsewhere in the world are using the technologies to change their patterns of operation.

2. The long-term impact of ICTs on higher education is still largely a matter of conjecture, and will only really start to become fully clear over the next fifteen to twenty years. This makes it particularly difficult to establish frameworks to regulate the systems into which they are being integrated. Nevertheless, certain trends in ICT use are emerging:

•        It is allowing for exponential increases in the transfer of data through increasingly globalized communication systems;

•        ICT networks have significantly expanded the potential for organizations to expand their sphere of operations and influence beyond their traditional geographical boundaries;

•        It is expanding the range of options available to education planners in terms of the teaching and learning strategies they choose to use, providing an often bewildering array of choices in terms of systems design options, teaching and learning combinations, and strategies for administering and managing education;

•        Systemically, it is tending to accentuate social disparities between rich and poor;

•        It is reducing barriers to entry of potential competitors to higher education institutions, by reducing the importance of geographical distance as a barrier, by reducing the overhead and logistical requirements of running education programmes and research agencies, and by expanding cheap access to information resources.

3. Changing patterns of organizational structures and operations, supported by the ICT trends outlined in point 2, are making it increasingly easier for new players to perform roles previously reserved for higher education institutions and to progressively expand their domains of operation. Many forms of competition pose very real threats to higher education, and all of them are outside the public higher education system. Such competition cannot be curtailed through regulation, as it will simply mutate to bypass that regulation. Regretfully, though, public higher education institutions still see themselves as primarily competing with one another, with the result that the system as a whole is becoming progressively less competitive. Strategies that deal with the effect that ICTs will have on the size and shape of higher education will have to focus specifically on dealing with these external threats.

4. The first step towards allowing more effective integration of ICTs into higher education is to create simpler and more flexible policy frameworks, rather than developing new policy instruments that are added to an already overly complicated policy environment. The number of areas and elements of education provision that need to be centrally regulated is far fewer than those currently being regulated. Attempts to regulate too many aspects of education implementation make it impossible to regulate anything effectively, as resource constraints and the complexity of detailed regulatory frameworks will derail such efforts. Regulation is important, but there need to be only a few, simple and clear indicators of quality that ensure accountability. They should focus on fewer aspects of quality, and ensure that they are met. It is also important to differentiate between regulation and support. Regulations set rules that people must follow or face legal action of some kind, while support creates no such obligations. Much work currently being done on regulating aspects of higher education provision should shift from regulating education provision to supporting its effective implementation.

5. Increased flexibility and simplicity of policy frameworks are not important for their own sakes, but because they are necessary prerequisites for meeting the policy challenges outlined in points 1 to 3. Integration of ICTs into systems inevitably creates ongoing pressures for change to the structures and operations of those systems. The more complex policies and procedures become, the less flexible they become and the harder they make it to allow for these shifts.

6. Any attempts to integrate ICT applications into higher education will depend, for their success, on the vision of those responsible for planning and implementation. Without a clear vision of how the strengths of ICTs can be harnessed and their weaknesses overcome, any initiative will be doomed to failure. This vision needs to be located in a concrete understanding of what the core functions of higher education actually are.

7. Arguments about how to harness ICTs most effectively to increase access to higher education should start with understanding how these technologies can be used to improve the efficiency of operations of the underlying systems of higher education. This is where the biggest immediate gains can be achieved, as existing ICT infrastructure within most of these systems can easily be harnessed. Successful application of ICTs in improving systemic efficiency and operations can lead to improvements in delivery of all higher education, regardless of what teaching and learning strategies are finally being used to communicate with students. This means that they contain much more persuasive potential for dealing meaningfully with problems of access and redress than using the same technologies to deliver education to disadvantaged students. They also constitute the most useful starting point for dealing with increasingly diverse forms of competition to public higher education. In particular, investments should be made in developing applications that:

•       Significantly improve the quality of management information systems (at national and institutional level) and  the ability to use these systems to support strategic decision-making and policy implementation; and

•       Contribute to stimulating free flow of information throughout the higher education system.

8. Point 7 is not simply about systemic or management issues. At heart, it is, in fact about effective implementation  of the core functions of higher education. For example, effective use of ICTs in the domain of teaching and learning flows much more easily when systems have already integrated effectives use of ICTs into their managements and internal communication systems. Without this base, use of ICTs to support delivery of education to learners will always be unsustainable.

9. Each education intervention should be planned and implemented on its own merits, rather than forced into simplistic, dichotomous categories (such as ‘distance education’ or ‘face-to-face education’), which set arbitrary and unhelpful constraints. Technologies can be applied in a range of ways, to support an almost limitless combination of teaching and learning strategies, and it is essential to keep options as open as possible. This flexibility should form the cornerstone of all planning processes. The national policy framework should also be re-designed to support this more flexible approach to planning and implementation of higher education. Contexts    of implementation should be understood before making decisions. Where there is a discrepancy between contexts of implementation and technology choices, the choice will either need to be changed or fully articulated strategies developed to change the context of implementation (although in some cases the latter may prove an unrealistic objective).

10. Within the broad framework provided above, the following roles for ICTs in supporting teaching and learning are   worth considering, amongst others:

•       Delivery of Educational Resources. ICTs can be used to provide immediately up-to-date resources – using one or more media – to large numbers of educators and learners easily and relatively cheaply. Changes made to resources can become immediately available to educators and students without incurring major additional distribution costs. Resource distribution should, however, not be mistaken for education. An additional benefit that ICTs can bring to designers of online learning resources is the huge resource base that resides on the World Wide Web.

•       Facilitating Communication. ICTs can be used to support a range of communication strategies, especially easy asynchronous communication between educator and learner and amongst learners. Where appropriate, this communication can be extended to include groups of people rather than just individuals. A major component of this strength is the capacity to support the many requirements for communication to ensure the effective management and administration of the system.

•       Facilitating Interaction in Resources. Combining the above, it becomes ICTs can provide educators with a range of very interesting opportunities for creating resources that allow learners different levels of interactivity. This can lead to the creation of interesting and exciting interaction for learners with educational resources.

•       Building and Exploiting Information Bases. There are growing possibilities for building and exploiting information bases Possibly most importantly, it becomes essential to develop effective strategies for storing information in ways that allow it to be very easily manipulated for future purposes. Increasingly value lies not in possessing information, but rather in developing the skills and capacity to manipulate it effectively for new applications. This indicates clearly the importance of developing management information systems that allow for cheap, easy, and logical storage and retrieval of information. 

11. Planning processes should seek, wherever possible, to build on past experiences – positive and negative – from South Africa and around the world. These include:

•       For any national or institutional planning exercises, a small – but commonly accepted – planning team should be established to drive planning processes. It could be made up of a few individuals selected not to represent key interests, but because of their ability to complete planning tasks effectively. To achieve buy-in effectively, open channels of communication between the planning team and various interested parties should be created, which allow for input from all of these parties before decisions are taken, rather than presenting completed plans.

•       Maintaining focus on the specific problems that education interventions need to solve is critical to the planning process. This focus is very easily lost, although planners often are unable to see this. Consequently, reflective processes to restore focus should punctuate all stages of planning exercises.

•       If investments in educational technologies are to make a meaningful and sustainable impact, they will have to be made as part of a broader process of shifting patterns of expenditure on education.

•       Strategic planning processes will need to manage carefully the expectations and assumptions of competing interested parties, both to ensure that these are balanced constructively and that they do not undermine the implementation of technology-enhanced learning strategies.

•       Investments in new technologies should be planned and implemented with a view to ensuring that they function as a catalyst for effecting critical changes. For this to work effectively, the ‘marketing’ of the investment needs to be carefully managed, and perceptions of buy-in by critical players needs to be well publicized.

•       Given current constraints, strategies need to focus narrowly on solving a few key problems. Ultimately, such a plan, which frames systemic change within much longer time-frames than is currently the norm (say, twenty-five years rather than five years), is likely to have an impact much faster than a plan which tries to solve all problems simultaneously.

•       There is a need for investment in flexible and sustainable infrastructures that will support educational applications in a variety of contexts.

•       International technical standards and protocols should be adopted if wastage is to be avoided. 

12. Effective use of ICTs in higher education will depend on establishing effective partnerships. The range of expertise required to use ICTs successfully is simply to great to assume that any single organization or even any single sector houses that expertise. Further, strategic partnerships are a critical element of building new visions of how ICTs can be used to greatest effect, as the creativity they generate inevitably opens new possibilities previously not seen. In this regard, it is also not viable to pretend that public-private partnerships can be avoided. Although there are many reasons to be sceptical of such partnerships and their potential to corrupt the core functions of higher education, effective integration of ICTs into higher education cannot take place without private sector involvement.