Online Higher Education in South Africa During COVID-19 and Beyond: Opportunities, Challenges, and Its Future

In this chapter we examine online education in South Africa’s institutions of higher learning during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as part of our effort to highlight the opportunitiesOpportunities, challengesChallenges, and prospects for this type of education in the country. We use the backdrop of South Africa’s Fourth Industrial Revolution (4th IR) agenda as a way of locating our discussion, while underscoring the fact that before COVID-19COVID-19, there were already government efforts underway to enhance the country’s industrial capacities and its Information and CommunicationsCommunication Technologies (ICT). Despite high expectations associated with the 4th IR, many parts of South Africa remain extremely impoverished and underdeveloped. Due to colonialism and apartheid, the country is still one of the most unequal societies in the world. High levels of poverty and unemployment continue to define South Africa’s developmentDevelopment prospects. These were the prevailing socio-political and economic conditions when COVID-19 broke out in South Africa in early 2020. If anything, COVID-19 not only exacerbated the existing inequalities in the country, but starkly exposed how divided the country was. This situation was also discernible in the higher educationHigher education sector. Since 1994, South Africa has been trying to make education a springboard for national development and to this end the government endeavours to transform this sector. It has also ratified various international and continental protocols that speak to this issue such as the United Nations (UN) Sustainable DevelopmentSustainable development Goals (SDGs) and the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2030. Using an exploratory case study approach, this chapter analyses online educationOnline education at three South African universities, namely, the University of Cape Town (UCT), University of Johannesburg (UJ) and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).