COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation of Education: What We Are Learning in South Africa

Abstract

The study sought to gauge the impact of COVID-19 pandemic in unleashing digital transformation in the education sector in South Africa. In order to gauge the impact, the study tracked the rate at which the 4IR tools were used by various institutions during the COVID-19 lockdown. Data were obtained from secondary sources, mainly newspaper articles, magazines and peer-reviewed journals. The findings are that, in South Africa, during the lockdown, a variety of 4IR tools were unleashed from primary education to higher and tertiary education where educational activities switched to remote learning (online learning). These observations point to the fact that South Africa generally has, some pockets of excellence to drive the education sector into the 4IR, which has the potential to increase access. Access to education, particularly at a higher education level, has always been a challenge due to a limited number of spaces available. Much as this pandemic has brought with it massive human suffering across the globe, there is an opportunity to assess successes and failures of deployed technologies, costs associated with them, and scaling these to technologies improve access.

COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation of Education: What Are We Learning on 4IR in South Africa?

“…The ministry of communication and digital technologies led the initiative. Through the minister, an announcement was made that the departments of communications and digital technologies and basic education had joined forces, to ensure virtual learning is a reality during the nation-wide lockdown [24,25]. This move was necessitated by both the closure of schools during the lockdown and the desire to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the education sector.…”

“…This move was necessitated by both the closure of schools during the lockdown and the desire to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the education sector. The other reason is that the country was not prepared for the disruption, and as a result bringing in virtual classes was a way to find possible ways that technology could help address the disruption induced by COVID-19 [24,25].…”

“…Besides, it was reported that, in the days after the President's first announcement of measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus on 15 March 2020, many schools had successfully taken the curricular online. As such, for many students, it was back to school that week, albeit from home [25,28].…”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Poverty Reduction in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)

“…Also, industry 4.0 is initiating new economic form in many sectors, the sharing economy (Mhlanga, 2020a, Mhlanga and Moloi, 2020b, Kravchenko and Kyzymenko, 2019. Services such as shared basketballs and toys; transport this shows how revolutionary the shared economy will become in the industry 4.0 (Mhlanga and Moloi, 2020a).…”

“…According to a study "COVID-19 and the Digital Transformation of Education: What We Are Learning in South Africa", Mhlanga and Moloi (2020a) found out that despite the existence of social distancing restriction necessitated by COVID-19, technology helped many people to be able to have access to classes through online education. The study also found out that technology can increase access to education especially if education move from face to face type of education to online education where space is not a limiting factor (Bennington-Castro, 2017).…”