Johannesburg, 12 Nov 2020
A cloud-based shared platform for higher education could extend the benefits of the best in higher education content to students across South Africa and even around the world; but building such an ecosystem would require collaboration from a broad range of stakeholders.
This emerged during an AWS webinar on skills development and capacity building for a future-proofed workforce this week.
Panellists taking part in the webinar said the COVID-19 pandemic had demonstrated that remote learning was possible and viable, and outlined a possible future in which all higher education could be curated in a shared cloud ecosystem and made affordable and accessible to all.
A shared platform could allow higher education to collaborate and share software and licensing costs in the emerging blended learning environment, panellists said.
Prof Ahmed Bawa, CEO of Universities South Africa, an umbrella body for 26 South African universities, said: “If we embarked on a national project to create a shared services platform accessible to all students and universities, then there would be no reason universities shouldn’t collaborate on programmes, courses and modules. We could be in a position to get the best courses available in each field, and aggregate courses into programmes – it becomes possible. This would even allow us to reach outside of the country into other markets – South Africa is in a good position, for example, to offer courses on deep level mining and wildlife conservation globally. But the critical issue is creating a national ecosystem with all parts working.”
He noted that the National Development Plan for Higher Education sought to increase participation rates to more than 30%. “That’s an extra 600 000 students. We could enable higher participation rates through online and mixed mode learning,” he said.
Panellists said the cloud could make this concept possible, although a number of challenges would stand in the way of achieving this scenario, including the cost of data and devices, and challenges in building a cohesive multidisciplinary ecosystem.
Dr Stanley Mpofu, CIO at the University of Witwatersrand, said: “The number of students a university can accept is determined by its physical infrastructure and resources. But with smart classrooms, you could have 100 000 students attending a single lecture from across the continent, or internationally. It could solve a lot of issues around buildings, accommodation, security and more. It could allow students to choose specific modules, or particular lecturers from around the world, and universities could even be more profitable if that concept worked. The question is – would it work and would it get support?”
He said he believed many students would prefer to continue learning remotely, but the biggest hurdle to this was the cost of mobile data.
Clive Charlton, Head of Solution Architecture: Public Sector, Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS, said a number of local universities had pivoted to remote teaching and learning during the pandemic, with great success. “Wits University moved its learning management system for 15 000 concurrent students to the cloud in under a month, and was able to distribute devices and negotiate zero-rated access for students, while the University of Pretoria deployed Blackboard to provide redundant access to nearly 50 000 students,” he said.
“During the pandemic, we found ways around the challenges of mobile data for students, including caching data locally with Amazon CloudFront. AWS worked with mobile network operators to zero rate some university content, making the mobile data costs for students affordable,” he said.