26 March 2020  Issue No: 262

Protracted student protests in South Africa over the past few years gave universities an opportunity to explore online education as an alternative to contact teaching and learning, and have put them in a better position to deal with current shutdowns necessitated by the need to contain COVID-19. Here, an academic from the University of Cape Town shares her experience and that of her colleagues in the process of “going online”.

A vice-chancellor of a private university in Ethiopia shares his experiences and lessons learned after his institution and its management urgently rallied to respond to an immediate nationwide shutdown of all educational institutions prompted by efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

One of South Africa’s most outspoken academics, Professor Adam Habib, vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, has called for a national solution to tackle ‘professional students’ on campuses throughout the country – some of whom he claims are permanent organisers for political parties.

In the two weeks since the last edition of University World News – Africa was published on 12 March 2020, the entire face of African higher education has changed as, one-by-one, country-wide closures of schools and universities have been announced and have taken effect.

Predictions that nothing much will change as a result of the coronavirus strike me as a reflection of the inherent biases and binaries of international higher education. Instead we should be directing our efforts towards engaging with globalisation and its discontents more proactively.

Professors are taking double, even triple workloads to try to adapt to online teaching as a result of the novel coronavirus. But what are the major challenges they face in switching to online teaching and how can they be effectively addressed? Here are some solutions.

The presidents of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have issued a joint plea to all higher education institutions and all other organisations across America to follow their example and take drastic action to address the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.