Mitigating the digital divide in the South African higher education system in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Access to higher education has been one of the critical areas of concern in South Africa, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The pandemic has brought the systemic cleavages into sharp relief, with 'access' and subsequent 'success' emerging as an important variable. Availability of digital facilities and internet connectivity have been important factors in enabling participation in higher education during the Covid-19 pandemic. The advent of the pandemic has, however, brought a new context to the challenges of higher education access, deepening the precarious position of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Thus, online teaching and learning intensified the digital divide between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots', exacerbating the already existing inequalities in the South African higher education system. The paper reflects on the question of how digital divide and access to learning infrastructure exacerbated inequality among students during the Covid-19 pandemic in South African higher education. This question is particularly important, given the rapid digitalisation of the curriculum that many South African institutions are still struggling to align with. This paper aims to interrogate the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic on South African higher education, highlighting the challenges of the digital divide and access to learning infrastructure using a social justice approach. The article draws on the work of Fraser (1999), which refers to the idea of social justice as distributional justice, re-allocating resources accessed solely by the privileged to the historically disadvantaged. It also aims to understand how the typology of inequality across the differentiated institutions affected the delivery of education during Covid-19. This is a qualitative research based on both secondary and primary data exploring official documents, statistics and published materials. The article argues towards a comprehensive and inclusive digital learning strategies with substantial coordination both from government and non-government stakeholders. It recommends that digital pedagogy and online platforms of learning should become an integral element of South African higher education services to ensure the continuity of education; this is necessary to avoid similar difficulties if crises that restrict physical movement occur in the future.

Strategies for overcoming the digital divide during the COVID‐19 pandemic in higher education institutions in Ghana

“…For example, the lack of Internet connection made it difficult for most students to transition to successfully enrol in distance/remote courses especially during the pandemic. This experience is consistent with the empirical studies on the COVID‐19 experience in African HEIs (Agormedah et al, 2020; Mpungose, 2020; Woldegiorgis, 2022). A faculty member in a private university also elaborated:

We have been dealing with the challenges of digital divide even before the COVID‐19 hit us, and with no policies or preparations regarding ways to find possible solutions to the challenges of digital divide or what I call access to ICT tools.

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“…For example, the lack of Internet connection made it difficult for most students to transition to successfully enrol in distance/remote courses especially during the pandemic. This experience is consistent with the empirical studies on the COVID-19 experience in African HEIs (Agormedah et al, 2020;Mpungose, 2020;Woldegiorgis, 2022). A faculty member in a private university also elaborated:…”

“…Interview data revealed that various HEIs in Ghana during the pandemic provided students especially those from low‐income families, with access to ICT platforms to do their schoolwork during the transition of classes to distance/remote education. Considering the exacerbation of the digital divide during the COVID‐19 pandemic, exemplified in several sub‐Saharan African cases (Azionya & Nhedzi, 2021; Mpungose, 2020; Woldegiorgis, 2022), the creation of ICT platforms would help HEIs in Ghana resist to the vicious circle between the pre‐existing social inequalities and the digital divide. As Schwantes (2020) mentioned, the flexibility and engagement of school leadership played an essential role in establishing ICT platforms amid the unexpected transition toward online education.…”

“…Some students from disadvantaged backgrounds even could not use Office 365 programs their university provided for free to support learning because their computer did not have enough RAM. Azionya and Nhedzi (2021) illustrated that the emergency transition toward online learning highlighted institutional disparities between historically black and white universities, which have been ingrained in the racial history of the Republic of South Africa (Czerniewicz et al, 2020; Woldegiorgis, 2022). Historically white universities could support marginalized students by delivering computers to their homes and purchasing data for online learning.…”

“…Although OECD (2018) data showed that computer‐student ratio is 0.8 in schools across OECD countries. But studies in Africa showed that the first level of digital divide associated with socio‐economic differences mediated by regional (Krönke, 2020) and ethnic/racial (Azionya & Nhedzi, 2021; Czerniewicz et al, 2020; Woldegiorgis, 2022) level. The second level of digital divide is closely related to the critics against the argument that there is no longer the first level of digital divide.…”