11 June 2020  Issue No: 273

As PhD enrolment in Africa increases, the need to ensure the quality of PhDs is becoming urgent. In this regard, promising developments in East Africa and South Africa offer a foundation upon which to forge a regional approach for use by quality assurance agencies across the continent.

Educational developers are in a good position to act as ‘shock absorbers’ against attempts to impose a standardisation of teaching and learning and corporate models of change that focus on competition and ‘choice’ in education rather than improving teacher confidence, autonomy and curiosity.

While Nigeria has recently eased its lockdown restrictions, educational institutions, including universities, have remained closed. The country’s private universities have responded by continuing to develop online learning, while many public universities are waiting for their physical facilities to reopen before restarting services.

The council of the Academy of Science of South Africa has defended the editorial independence of its flagship journal – the South African Journal of Science – and the right of any academic to submit for publication the results of research in the scholarly journal subject to editorial review processes.

Dual purposing partnerships are the way forward for internationalisation of higher education in a post-COVID-19 world, as they mean partners can leverage each other’s resources into something more than each could do on their own. Developing an institutional culture supporting internationalisation is also key.

Leaders need to be guided, intellectually stretched and coached according to the specific contexts they face, not subjected to online generalised packages. Now is the time to set up more business schools emphasising value-generating leadership rather than greater generalised remote learning.

The coronavirus crisis and the resulting government clampdown on foreigners entering Australia have cut earning capacity and created a revenue crisis for universities that has already left the top eight institutions dangerously exposed and is set to deepen, a new report has found.