Page 54 - Transformation Indaba Report

We were tasked by the pandemic to focus on completing their final year. The academic fraternity lead us to realise
our academic years. That necessitated online learning. The we can do this work online if forced to.
university responded in leaps and bounds, to be able to
finish the academic years 2020 and 2021. The challenge is how to balance online versus mask-to-
mask. What appetite do we have going forward to go
ICT is a domain we’ll need to resource and become very online as far as what we possibly can?
strategic in terms of how we resource it and what we do
because it’s an opportunity as well. We can go into the There’s PASS staff that can do their work from home and
space of online learning but more aggressively. that pushes us into a different dimension. Our working
Looking back we’ve responded positively. We’ve respond- spaces are then quite challenged. How can we capitalise on
ed by enabling the student devices in a big way for first the opportunity of freed-up space and modernise spaces
years and finishing students or students that are finishing to respond to the teaching and learning question? (Wayne)

Dropout rate: stats provided by L&T show 2020 pass rate was higher. The expectation in the sector was that you’re going to
end up losing a lot of students which then affects your pass rate in a year, and eventually your graduation rate as well. But
it didn’t seem to be affected. The digital shift brings new type of problems. The question is how we will cope. (L Hashatse)

Completing the academic year was important in the state learning that has been taking place. How do we balance
of crisis. If we talk about sustainable resource stewardship benefits of online learning with the way in which we’ve been
- how sustainable is mass online learning? We can teach a teaching the last few years? Is that sustainable for students
lot more students because space isn’t needed but human and staff going forward on levels besides financial level?
resources are still needed e.g., lecturers to process things. (Jenny)
Pass rates are not necessarily reflective of the quality of the

Dropout is a universal problem, so it’s not just us. If we can males. They are dropping out enormously which is strange
improve on that, the more students who graduate means because African females are doing very well (although com-
the more money we’re going to get. That’s one way we can ing from similar backgrounds). If we can tackle that problem
really improve subsidy because you only get output subsidy we can make a huge impact on our throughput rates.
when students graduate. If students miss/don’t complete
even one module we don’t get a penny of output subsidy. We’ve been losing international students even before the
That is part of the funding framework. We must produce pandemic so there’s other reasons why we are losing them.
a graduate for money. Student success interventions will The numbers have been in decline for years. We used to
hopefully contribute to better throughput rates. The big- have almost double the numbers that we have now. Are we
gest group of students we lose are African and Coloured no longer attractive to international students? (Charles)

We’ve learned lessons about living with the COVID-19 setting such that it doesn’t affect us greatly.Dropout rates are not
significantly more than before, apart from international students and maybe PG students as well? Learning to operate
digitally is one lesson. (L Hashatse)

NelsoN MaNdela UNiversity • traNsforMatioN iNdaba • 2022 48