Johannesburg, 07 Sep 2022
Education of the future is borderless, on-demand and more accessible, so education institutions need to be future-proofing their operations to adapt to this new era through digital transformation and cloud migration.
Unisa uses the cloud as part of its hybrid cloud infrastructure, which supports education and services for over 700 000 active accounts. Unisa’s distance-learning model and growing reach means the university must support up to 30 000 concurrent connections running in real-time during exams. This is according to Kwena Mokgohloa, Acting Director Infrastructure and Operations at Unisa, who was speaking ahead of the education focused third event of the AWS Cloud Technology 2022 Series.
“For Unisa, the cloud is necessary, like oxygen – it’s not a choice. Cloud infrastructure not only supports current needs, it will also give the institution the flexibility and scale it needs to adapt as education changes.
“We embrace digitisation to support our strategy, which includes being capable of having up to one million students at any given time. With digital transformation and cloud infrastructure, the boundaries of institutions, countries or even continents no longer matter. We already have international students and we expect to grow these numbers. With digitally enabled education, a student in Australia has exactly the same benefits and experiences as a student in Pretoria does,” said Mokgohloa.
Tertiary institutions must transform strategically, informed by where the world is going, Mokgohloa said. A poll of this webinar’s participants in 2021 revealed that 86% felt South African institutions are not using data to its full potential to make strategic decisions.
Agnat Max Makgoale, Senior Account Manager at AWS, said data and analytics are increasingly important tools to help institutions extract data in order to understand the student’s experience, increase student retention and improve student throughput. To digitise learning is beyond the learning management system alone.
Mokgohloa added “The new generation of students live in a digital world and don’t want to be confined by the walls of a campus. They have a subscription mentality and they want education on demand – they don’t want to wait until January to register for their masters of PhD,” he says. “If you aren’t embracing the change, you’ll find yourself out of business: now your local students are enrolling in overseas universities and you’re competing with those institutions.”
On the other hand, the globalisation of education also offers new opportunities for local education institutions. “Globalised education gives people choice and increases competition, but also expands institutions’ reach. Unisa is trying to lead this movement – we are blessed with the mandate we already have, and we aim to grow internationally so students anywhere in the world can register and continue their studies through us,” he says.
Makgoale added: “The cloud can create a customised cloud infrastructure that is secure, available, efficient and flexible. Customers can scale it up when usage peaks, such as during enrolment and graduation, and is also not confined to geographies.”
Mokgohloa said the cloud removes the limitations that once made education inaccessible to many. “In South Africa, we produce more matriculants than universities can take. We have young people sitting at home because they couldn’t find space. They are limited by walls, boundaries and buildings, so once these things are removed, anyone can have space,” he said. Digitisation makes education more cost-effective, he added. “We can have a module with 20 000 students and only one or two lecturers empowered to manage that. With digitisation and the cloud, we are taking away manual work so we can do more with lower expenses. You won’t need markers or invigilators – now you have apps for that. We could make education more accessible and affordable, and available anytime.”
Mokgohloa concluded that Africa’s education institutions must transform to keep pace with global change: “We can’t let Africa be last in the 4IR, we can’t miss it. The knowledge is available and education is global, and we have to harness that. Technology vendors and cloud providers need to partner with us to drive the transformation we need,” he said.
Mokgohloa will be among the industry experts addressing the 'Innovation for technology-enabled education executive forum' hosted by AWS on 13 September in Johannesburg. The event will also feature Makgoale, senior Account Manager for the education sector at AWS, Eiffel Corp Chief Commercial Officer Stefan du Plessis, Department of Science and Technology Acting CIO Clement Mtetwa and Adrian Van Eeden, Chief Information Officer of GIBS, who will discuss equipping the country’s current and future workforce to meet the demands of the digital era, and how digital tools can be highly complementary to face-to-face learning for a hybrid learning environment.
For more information and to register for the virtual event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/event/aws-innovation-for-technology-enabled-education
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