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Bob Day, Bob Jolliffe
3.2.1. HEI Collaboration and Partnerships – South African Experience To date, strategic inter-HEI collaboration in South Africa has been limited, and cooperation has been most successful in areas of technical and infrastructural support and services, e.g. enhancing library access, strengthening ICT capabilities, and establishing a central applications office. This may, in part, be due to the extensive financial support HEIs have received for such projects from donor agencies. Another likely reason is that these projects often provide economies of scale that could not have been attained by HEIs operating alone. Arguably, the HEIs greatest and most successful infrastructure collaboration to date is the national academic and research network, where HEIs bought bandwidth from UNINET24. UNINET was never managed on a cooperative basis, but as a separate national project. The Tertiary Education Network (TENET), was formed to take over from UNINET in the provision of Internet access to universities, technikons and research institutions. At the same time, TENET is the corporate customer through which Telkom SA provides the actual networking services. Like UNINET, TENET has an annual turnover of around R15 million, but unlike UNINET, it does not operate routers, cache servers or other network devices. Instead it manages the contractual and business relationship with Telkom, the service provision relationships with each of the sites, and any assistance from the donor community. The generic learning from various stages of this long-running project indicates that the best way to structure a collaborative venture between many HEIs, at least in the case of infrastructure projects in South Africa, is to minimize the amount of sustained collaborative behaviour that is required. This can be done by structuring the collaboration to operate as much as possible like a normal business. 3.2.2. Analysis of Current and Future Use and Outputs of ICTs by HEIs There is a widely held belief in South African HEIs that they are falling behind the developed world in their application of ICTs. For the public higher education system, operating with extremely limited resources, this is especially serious. The best HEI systems are still not nearly as sophisticated as those in developed nations, and there are other institutions whose systems and levels of connectivity are negligible. The absence of appropriate technological support and the infrastructure necessary to secure high levels of connectivity is likely to disadvantage the entire academic and research enterprise of the HE system. And this in turn will severely compromise their ability to collaborate with, support, and teach the ICT sector (and, of course, all other sectors of society). ICTs can be and are used in various ways by HEIs in South Africa and Africa. Hence, this analysis is structured in terms of teaching, administration, community service, and research. Teaching of ICTs: The current ICT related courses provided by HEIs result in a range of accredited qualifications including degrees (graduate and post-graduate), diplomas, and certificates. These are primarily aimed at creating technicians, technologists and professionals for the long-established IT Sector and their traditional markets (e.g. military, finance, retail, etc.). These are important people, and Africa has an immediate need for many more of them, and of world class. However, there is a much broader range of ICT capabilities that need to be created to satisfy all the growing needs of Africa’s emerging knowledge society. This is a chicken and egg situation – if we don’t provide such people, society will not grow, i.e. it cannot be demand-led. Our society must, collectively, take the risk of anticipating (and thereby stimulating) the demand. There are three main areas of ICT teaching/learning material that are widely needed: • ICT Literacy/Fluency: Most of this education is likely to occur prior to, or outside the tertiary sector. However, much current literacy material is outdated (e.g. “computyping”), and the dynamism of the ICT sector demands updating annually, at least. In addition, much of the material has not been designed for the many thousands of potential learners from rural and remote areas. In such cases it is essential that, for example, language and cultural issues are catered for if we are serious about bridging 24 Extracted from: Leatt , JV & Martin DH, CITTE series, 2000: Reflections on Collaboration Within SA Higher Education by Two Bloodied but Unbowed Participants.
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