After COVID-19 – ‘Nothing will be the same’

Diminished high-level research funding and fewer face-to-face conferences and collaboration – these are some of the potential consequences from the coronavirus pandemic as it affects higher education in Africa. But there may be a host of benefits too.

Speculating on the contours of a post-COVID-19 higher education landscape, African university vice-chancellors, academics and representatives of research funding agencies and global alliances took a determinedly upbeat approach during the virtual Times Higher Education (THE) Southern Africa Impact Virtual Forum.

Initially meant to be physically hosted over two days by the University of Pretoria in South Africa, like several other international conferences, the forum was moved online and was viewed by more than 300 people from over 50 countries.

Max Bergman, chair of social research at the University of Basel, research councillor of the Swiss National Science Foundation and member of the Uganda National Academy of Sciences, said while most predictions are likely to be wrong, it was clear that “hardly anything will remain the same” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think most predictions that we are making are likely to be wrong. And on the other hand, hardly anything will remain the same. A recent Guardian opinion piece introduced the idea that we're going to look back at this time and think of it as BC (Before Corona) as opposed to AC (After Corona).”

Research funding

“Many people will consider high-level research, excellent research, as something that is currently not affordable, and I have a feeling that this will disproportionately affect funding,” said Bergman.

He said in his view the period “after coronavirus” would see a large increase in the number of older students in higher education, with opportunities for upskilling and changing of career paths. There would be improved access, including for African scholars and institutions, to international resources and knowledge bases.

Bergman said it was likely that many countries, not only on the African continent but beyond, would invest more in public health and health-related research. In addition, religious organisations, philanthropists, endowments and pro-government ideologies would have an increasing role in the research agenda.

“I believe that we will also see an expansion of private for-profit, teaching universities that are likely to become more efficient, perhaps because of an international label and their affordability, and they will compete more and more with conventional universities,” he predicted.

Bergman forecast that politics would also have an influence on funding priorities, resulting in a possible loss of top researchers to migration.

‘Band-aid’ spending

In the post-COVID-19 world, he said, there will be greater debate on Eurocentric or Western-centric versus Afro-centric research – a lot of “band-aid spending approaches” in the sense that political decision-makers will try to boost public health systems, focusing research on transmittable diseases, followed by research aimed at economic rebuilding efforts.

Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer of THE, admitted that higher education was facing “profoundly unsettling times”.

He said some universities were now facing existential financial crises. “The dependence by many on international students for financial survival has been cruelly exposed by the pandemic,” he said.

This had forced universities to rethink their business models as traditional forms of examination and assessment have been thrown out and the boundaries between physical and digital learning become blurred.

Talent flows disrupted

Baty said the grounding of flights, combined with the almost unimaginable long-term effects of a global economic crisis, mean that the international flows of talent that have been the lifeblood of the global university and research sectors will be deeply disrupted, perhaps forever.

However, despite the gloom descending on the sector and on the world, Baty said he remains optimistic.

“Why? Because I know the great power of and profound force for good of the world’s universities. Universities produced and are producing the health care workers; they're at the frontline in the fight against the virus. Universities are providing the data, the analysis, the expertise. That is shaping effective public policy in the fight against this virus,” he said.

“Universities are providing the evidence, the research, the facts to counter fake news and misinformation … universities are providing the armies of skilled student volunteers who are stepping up … universities are providing the learning materials and resources to help the hidden new workforce, with parents and carers home-schooling children …”

Joanna Newman, chief executive and secretary general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), said one of the positive outcomes of the pandemic is that universities have had to adapt much more quickly to the online environment – with potential benefits to more equitably address the gap between supply and demand of higher education, particularly in the Global South.

She said her association had already been experimenting with funding partners, governments and with members in African countries on possible models, one of which was the idea of a distance masters degree or split-site PhD scholarships as a way of building capacity and partnerships and fostering international collaboration, without the commensurate loss of skills and human resources from the Global South.

Newman acknowledged Professor Adam Habib, outgoing vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, for pushing the idea of distance masters degrees and split-site PhDs as a way of building capacity and partnerships.

Blended learning in the spotlight

Newman said another example was the ACU’s Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning, which helps to address academic staff shortages in East African universities by sharing quality degree courses – developed in partnership with African universities, and delivered through blended learning.

University of Pretoria Vice-Chancellor Tawana Kupe agreed that the biggest challenge for South African universities presented by the pandemic had been the need to move teaching and learning, as well as research activities, online immediately.

However, he said the situation is providing opportunities for universities to engage in transdisciplinary knowledge production. “With regard to COVID-19, no single discipline can address the challenge,” he said.

Funmi Olonisakin, vice-president and vice-principal international and professor of security, leadership and development at King’s College London, said she anticipated that COVID-19 would create opportunities to test the quality of engagement of European and United Kingdom universities with their African partners.

“Co-creation of content online and virtually is where things are going,” Olonisakin said, referring to the King’s College collaboration with junior academics in China, the UK and more than five African universities, including the University of Pretoria, to co-create academic programmes and practise working on the same platform. It is anticipated that this will lead to a joint PhD programme down the line.

Olonisakin added that the next generation of academics should be allowed to develop quality programmes in their countries. “Exchange programmes will look different: if a student is in Pretoria and my students are there they should be able to sit on the same programme. We should be confident that they will earn the same degree of the same quality.”

In this context, the move towards technology will be an enabler, she said.

The forum discussion is available online.

This article benefited from input by Primarashni Gower who is based in the Department of Institutional Advancement at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.