The radicalisation of the #FeesMustFall protests is destroying the legitimacy of the movement, but that should not distract us from the problem it is trying to highlight: the inaccessibility of affordable, high quality education in South Africa.
But no matter how many bricks are thrown or political promises are made, no solution will be found through confrontation - the resources simply don’t exist to provide free education without draining state resources to the detriment of other areas of development.
A short-term solution is needed to calm the current disruption, but it will be meaningless without a fundamental change in the education system to solve the problem of inaccessibility. One such solution is a centrally planned system of online tertiary education.
There are already a number of online education providers in South Africa. Red & Yellow advertising and marketing school and Friends of Design Academy of Digital Arts both offer online short-courses in addition to their full-time qualifications.
GetSmarter exclusively offers online education. It has 61, six to twelve week courses that provide training and certification for a specific skill. GetSmarter has also partnered with UCT to offer postgraduate diplomas in Business Project Management (1 year) and Management in Marketing (2 years).
Distance learning
By student numbers, Unisa is South Africa’s largest university and provides distance learning for both full- and part-time degrees. While it offers many of the benefits of flexible study, its teaching methodology is not specifically designed for online delivery.
Current online services are useful additions to traditional tertiary education, but fall short of the potential that digital platforms have to significantly increase access to quality education. In the undergraduate university system, students are required to attend a series of lectures for each subject and in some cases, are also required to attend a tutorial where they receive more personalised attention.
For purely content-based courses (those that do not require physical infrastructure such as laboratories or workshops), all requirements can be carried out just as effectively online. Lectures can be recorded and tutorials can be conducted via live chat sessions or delayed question and answer formats. Class debates can be facilitated via forums. The major challenge lies in how to verify the identification of students if examination is also based online.
While online interaction cannot replace the soft skills of interpersonal contact, the benefits of an online system could solve many issues that hold back the quality and accessibility of education in South Africa.
Online lectures make more efficient use of teaching hours; each lecture can be recorded once and repeated across an unlimited number of students. In contrast, when I taught economics at UCT, it took the lecturing team more than 18 hours of preparation and teaching time to deliver the same lecture to the 1 400 students in the course.
One of the criticisms of online education is the lack of student-teacher interaction. But with audiences in first year lectures often exceeding 200 students, a direct video lecture that can be paused and rewound provides a more intimate teaching medium than the current system.
For online education to render its full benefits it requires a total overhaul of teaching structure and methodology to suit digital interaction. Designed for online delivery, education systems can be more flexible to changing content. Online systems can provide better analytics of student behaviour and learning methods.
Students can adjust when and how they study to best suit their personal situations, increasing impact and absorption of the material. They are also better able to adjust their study schedules, having more freedom to work and finance themselves while getting a degree. Remote study also cuts the costs of transport and accommodation.
No amount of negotiation between protesters, universities and the government will result in a long-term solution for all. We either need new resources or a new system; online education could provide the latter.
* Pierre Heistein is the instructor of UCT’s Applied Economics for Smart Decision Making course. Follow him on Twitter @PierreHeistein.
* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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