Different Shades of Success: Educator Perceptions of Government Strategy on E‐Education in South Africa

Abstract

In most literature evaluating ICT4D projects in education, the yard stick used to evaluate ICT implementation in business which seeks to establish value is used. As a result most of the projects are in our opinion, wrongly deemed to have been failed. We propose that a better measure of success should consider the context in which the project exists and the perception of the intended recipients -for example a similar objective measure of project outcome could be perceived differently by people of different economic and social status. In this paper, we will demonstrate this concept by evaluating the perception of success of the implementation of an e-learning strategy in disadvantaged areas in South Africa. Data for the study was collected through various qualitative means in selected disadvantaged areas of Cape Town. Even though a number of existing evaluations point to general failure of implementation of the e-learning strategy, our study showed that the teachers in the disadvantaged areas considered the system a success based on the intangible benefits they derived from the implementation. Therefore this paper calls for a different way of evaluating ICT for education systems. James and Miller (2005), evaluation looks at performance against set goals. Where the ICT implementation is evaluated against policy goals there were two predominant approaches. The foundationalism and the constructivist approaches. These have however have been progressively merged as the current approach is to have evaluation establish the extent to which the goals and intentions of the policy have been achieved and the level of policy support. Within information Systems (IS), approaches to evaluation of information Systems is diverse. There are approaches which posit that IS evaluation should assess and inform economic returns, or assess social costs, political and social dimensions, power relationships or evaluate primary goods, mental states and those things that an individual attaches value to or craves in relation to the Information Technology (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1996;Hirschheim and Smithson, 1998;Wilson and Howcroft, 2000;Sen, 1999) All these perceptions on what IS evaluation should focus on have led to different approaches to the evaluation process. There are evaluation approaches that take cognisance of value as the prime driver of Information Technology (IT) evaluation. There are several of these, namely the value scorecard evaluation technique which was developed by Remenyi (2002). Value under this approach is evaluated by establishing the consensus amongst stakeholders of the requisite changes needed for the overall implementation objective to succeed and the extent to which these have taken place. Information systems actability was developed by Agerfalk (2003). This evaluation approach evaluates the social actions of the users of the information system. This is called the real use context. The other approach is the constructivist IS evaluation where the belief is that IT evaluation has to take into consideration ...

The Dreams Plan: A Blupoint Strategy for e‐Education Provision in South Africa

“…This is the critical local community knowledge that has so often been lacking in previous government policies. At BluPoint we believe that "it is important to realistically assess the extent to which the desired outcomes and goals of the e-education government strategy are achievable in the context within which the institutions and individuals operate" (Mooketsi & Chigona 2014). Consider the following research findings, previously published in this journal.…”

“…There was a call for the increased use of ICTs in the public interest and to ensure that every school has access to ICTs for the purposes of high quality education for all. However recent research on the Khanya Project (Mooketsi & Chigona, 2014) suggests that the current e-education strategy is not working for many communities in South Africa. There is a considerable disparity between government legislation and implementation on the ground, and there are concerns of rising costs and difficulties associated with introducing new technologies and infrastructures.…”

“…This paper presents an alternative to the current SA e-education strategy. We believe that a better measure of success should "consider the context in which the project exists and the perception of the intended recipients" (Mooketsi & Chigona, 2014). Success in ICT4D is open to many different interpretations and perception of success for any given e-education strategy will depend on who is doing the talking.…”

“…Success in ICT4D is open to many different interpretations and perception of success for any given e-education strategy will depend on who is doing the talking. We believe that it is important to consider intangible impacts in human development and not just the tangible or quantifiable impacts (Mooketsi & Chigona, 2014). A prime example of impact which is intangible is dreaming.…”

“…A recent study published in this journal (Mooketsi & Chigona, 2014) suggests that the current e-education strategy is not working for many communities in South Africa. This paper presents an alternative e-education strategy for South Africa known as the DREAMs plan (Digital Resources for Education And Mobility).…”