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The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the 'free' offerings from big tech companies; it is these very contexts which are most vulnerable. Yet educators within such environments are not mere pawns of circumstance. While the realities of their structural constraints may be invisible or obfuscated, educators are driven by their own 'concerns', which in this case pertain to the needs of diverse students in very challenging circumstances as well as to their personal aversion to being monitored. This paper reports on findings from focus groups in a mixture of institutionsin South African education. Archer's theoretical framework provides a lens to show how, despite very little choice, educators critically reflect on their circumstances expressing discomfort and unease.

Objectives: The purpose of the study was to illuminate and assess the experiences and feelings of the staff of a center for teaching and learning at one South African university during the early months (April--June 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns when it switched from face-to-face teaching to emergency remote teaching (ERT). It explores the practical, operational, ethical, cultural, and emotional questions that the staff of this center dealt with as they supported the university in ERT provision. Method: This paper draws on in-depth interviews with 23 staff members of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT) who revealed not only the logistical, technical, and administrative challenges faced during the ERT rollout period but the efforts they made to ensure that their efforts promoted equity (for students), agility (for the university), and psychological sustainability (for themselves). Findings: Using cultural historical activity theory as a lens to assess CILT staff activities, findings indicate that a number of contradictions and tensions emerged during this period--concerning exacerbated inequities, pedagogical compromises, cultural anxieties, and psychological pressures--that could not be fully resolved but only managed. Implications for Research: CILT staff are interested not only in providing logistical, technical, and practical support to a university but also in dealing effectively with the ethical, cultural, and emotional concerns that arise in times of crisis and transition, such as the current one. Understanding what happened during COVID-19 may offer insights into how other centers for teaching and learning can adjust to what will likely remain an unstable future in higher education. Conclusion: The pandemic ruptured the previously organic change and growth that characterized CILT development, transforming it as the staff responded to this South African university's need to provide support to academics and students engaging with ERT.

This paper explores how academics navigate the Higher Education (HE) landscape being reshaped by the convergence of unbundling, marketisation and digitisation processes. Social Realism distinguishes three layers of social reality (in this case higher education): the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical layer is presented by the academics and their teaching; the actual are the institutional processes of teaching, learning, assessment, mode of provision (online, blended); the real are the power and regulatory mechanisms that shape the first two and affect academics' agency. Two dimensions of academics' experiences and perceptions are presented. The structural dimension reflects academics' perceptions of the emergent organisation of the education environment including the changing narratives around digitisation, marketisation and unbundling in the context of digital inequalities. The professional dimension aspects play out at the actor level with respect to work-related issues, particularly their own. This dimension is portrayed in academics' concerns about ownership and control.

A number of universities in South Africa are sharing teaching materials online making them freely available as Open Educational Resources (OER). The open sharing of teaching materials has been coupled with a number of institutional policy initiatives. This paper seeks to explore the institutional policy landscape of OER in South Africa in order to first understand the discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies and second, to critique and problematize the major discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used as a tool for identifying dominant discourses in OER. Findings show that OER policies in public universities in South Africa are underpinned by three dominant discourses on access, collaboration and transformation. The extent to which OER can democratise access to education and redress socio-historic inequalities in the provision of educational resources is not guaranteed. Some scholars argue that OER could in some contexts perpetuate inequalities if the same barriers of accessing education in a traditional classroom have not been dealt with. OER policies are written as optimistic accounts on how to publish OER but they do not do a good job in encouraging reuse.

The advent of massive open online courses and online degrees offered via digital platforms has occurred in a climate of austerity. Public universities worldwide face challenges to expand their educational reach, while competing in international rankings, raising fees and generating third-stream income. Online forms of unbundled provision offering smaller flexible low-cost curricular units have promised to disrupt this system. Yet do these forms challenge existing hierarchies in higher education and the market logic that puts pressure on universities and public institutions at large in the neoliberal era? Based on fieldwork in South Africa, this article explores the perceptions of senior managers of public universities and of online programme management companies. Analysing their considerations around unbundled provision, we discuss two conflicting logics of higher education that actors in structurally different positions and in historically divergent institutions use to justify their involvement in public-private partnerships: the logic of capital and the logic of social relevance.

This paper examines the idea of 'core business' in contemporary South African public universities. South Africa's public higher education system has global ambitions, but is also highly internally stratified. Drawing on new data from interviews with higher education leaders and government policymakers across a number of South African institutions, we show that while the rhetoric of 'core business' of the university has been adopted by higher education leaders, the question of what constitutes the purpose of the university, in South Africa and arguably beyond, is subject to ongoing debate and negotiation. The multiplicity of conflicting but coexisting narratives about what universities should do in South African society--producing excellent research, preparing a labour force, or addressing societal inequalities--exposes a persisting tension surrounding the purpose of a public university. And while this tension has historical origins, we show that responses to addressing these various roles of the institution are not developed organically and in a neutral context. They emerge under conflicts over limited state funding and attendant and opportune market pressure put on public universities in times of crisis, that shape profoundly their framing and outcomes, and the future of the universities.

This paper describes the habitus and technological practices of a South African rural student in his first year at university. This student is one of five self-declared rural students, from a group of 23 first-years in four South African universities, whose access to, and use of, technologies in their learning and everyday lives was investigated in 2011 using a "digital ethnography" approach. Their digital practices, in the form of their activities in context, were collected through multiple strategies in order to provide a nuanced description of the role of technologies in their lives. The student reported on here came from a school and a community with very little access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). While the adjustment to first year can be challenging for all students, the findings show that this can be especially acute for students from rural backgrounds. The study provides an analysis of one student's negotiation of a range of technologies six to nine months into his first year at university. Earlier theoretical concepts provide a lens for describing his practices through a consideration of his habitus, and access to and use of various forms of capitals in relation to the fields--especially that of higher education--in which he was situated.

Issues of inequality in higher education have received considerable attention in recent decades, but the intersection of inequality and educational technology at an institutional level has received little attention. This study aims to provide a perspective on institutional educational technology policy informed by current understandings of inequality. The study takes the form of a content analysis of institutional educational technology policy and strategy documents of universities in the United Kingdom and South Africa. A preliminary review of the educational technology policy literature reveals low levels of engagement with issues of inequality in policy documents at an institutional level. Therborn's typology of inequality provides the basis of a structured framework for the analysis, with Bourdieu's concepts of capital being incorporated as markers of the various types of inequality. The study reveals regional differences in the approach to inequality as a policy matter, as well as a varied engagement with the issues of inequality related to educational technology at a policy level.

In the past few years, concepts of the digital divide and theories of access to ICT have evolved beyond a focus on the separation of the "haves" and the "have nots" to include more than just physical access to computers. Researchers have started considering the conditions or criteria for access and broadened the concept by including additional components. Terms such as "real access", "thick conceptions of access" and "social inclusion" give some indication as to the change in thinking about access to ICT. These broader views of access are particularly applicable in the Higher Education context. However, in examining the applicability of the existing theories of ICT access, we found that no single model fully encompassed that range of resources required for access to ICTs in Higher Education in South Africa. We therefore combined, simplified and enhanced the existing models to develop a comprehensive framework for ICT access. Our model of access describes what people use, need and draw on in order to gain or acquire access to specific ICT uses and practices in terms of different kinds of resources namely technology resources; resources for personal agency; contextual resources; and online content resources. The applicability of this model has been tested in a survey of academic staff and students in Higher Education Institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa. The aim of this research is to explore access to and use of ICT and how they may support or hinder a range of educational technology practices.

Using Schatzki's practices framework as a lens, this paper reports on the practices of university students accessing learning resources at a research-intensive university in South Africa. Using a mixed-methods approach, 1001 survey responses and 6 focus groups were analysed to explore how students in three professional disciplines access learning resources, with the focus on digitally mediated piracy practices. The findings suggest a blurring between the legal and the illegal and indicate the normalcy of piracy practices, with nuanced distinctions and understandings manifest.

As the boundaries between technology and social media have decreased, the potential for creative production or participatory practices have increased. However, the affordances of online content creation (OCC) are still taken up by a minority of internet users despite the opportunities offered for engagement and creativity. While previous studies have addressed creative production by university students for specific purposes, there is a research gap concerning OCC in the everyday lives of African university students. This paper describes the stories of three students who are online creators of content, the social media they utilised; their trajectories; their linkages with career interests; the types of online presences they created, maintained or discontinued into their university lives. As the case studies spanned digital practices that were informal and extracurricular yet peer-supported as well as interest-driven and academically oriented, the pedagogical framework of Connected Learning proved an appropriate heuristic. The study shows that being a digital creator gives students a competitive edge in our globally competitive society.

This article investigates the relationship between policy (conceptualised as goals, values and resources), organisational culture and e-learning use. Through both qualitative and quantitative research methods, we gathered data about staff and student perspectives from four diverse South African universities representing a selection of ICT in education policy types (Structured and Unstructured) and organisational cultural types of "collegium, bureaucracy, corporate and enterprise" (McNay, 1995). While our findings show a clear relationship between policy and use of ICTs for teaching and learning, organisational culture is found crucial to policy mediation and the way that e-learning use is embedded within the organisation. We conclude that although a Structured Corporate institutional type enables the attainment of a "critical mass" within e-learning, Unstructured Collegium institutions are better at fostering innovation. Unstructured Bureaucratic institutions are the least enabling of either top down or bottom up e-learning change. (Contains 3 tables and 6 figures.)

Drawing on Archer's perspectives on the agency/structure relationship, this paper explains situations where students in varied, challenging circumstances find ways to negotiate difficult conditions. It reports on a 2007 study undertaken through a survey at three quite different universities in three South African provinces, addressing inter-related questions on access and use. Our findings are that on-campus access is generally reported favourably, and off-campus access is problematic and uneven. There is a cluster of students using their cell phones to access the Internet, and using their cell phones for academic purposes, and this is true across socio-economic groups (SEGs). It is especially striking that students from low SEGs do so. The findings show the choices students are prepared to make and the strategies which they find in order to engage online or access the Internet to support their studies. Archer's nuanced approach to agency and structure helps us begin to make sense of the way that students exhibit a more complex and nuanced way of engaging with the availability of different kinds of technologies, as well as making considered decisions about using ubiquitous technologies in unexpected ways and for purposes for which they may not have been intended. Her concept of reflexivity provides a way of describing how those choices are made in relation to structural conditions and enables us to explain how students are "persons" showing an inventive capacity to circumvent the constraints imposed by structures. (Contains 5 figures, 3 tables and 6 notes.)

Numerous South African policy documents support the use of ICTs in education, claiming that they can be beneficial to education, in a variety of ways. This article seeks to understand how ICTs are used in practice as part of teaching and learning, since access to ICTs alone does not ensure use, nor automatically add value. Through a regional study conducted in five higher education institutions in the Western Cape, we describe how and to what extent academic staff and students are using ICTs as part of teaching and learning events. Using an analytical framework adapted from Laurillard, we are able to provide more complex descriptions of how ICTs are being used, and to describe how specific staff and student groupings use ICTs differently. We confirm that ICTs are certainly being used as part of teaching and learning, most frequently as part of discovery and creation events. We also identify areas where the specific possibilities and affordances of ICTs are not being exploited. In addition, we identify anomalies in use in terms of age, and disciplinary domain. We find too that students report using ICTs to support their learning activities even when it is not required of them to do so. This evokes questions about staff-student interactions, and has implications for institutional staff development strategies.

During the period 2015–2017, student protests and university shutdowns rocked the higher education sector in South Africa, with key issues being raised regarding student exclusion based on financial, epistemological and cultural grounds. In this highly politicised and contested environment, some universities decided to use blended and online delivery as a strategy to enable the academic year to be completed and all curriculum to be covered, despite the disruptions. This was a controversial decision politically and a challenging one practically. From the perspective of the academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), this paper draws on interviews with educators in three broad disciplinary areas to explore their views, practices, and experiences regarding the use of online materials in these unique circumstances. Activity Theory provides a framework to consider the issues systemically and to identify the tensions and contradictions in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we locate open access in the South African higher education research context where it is, distinctively, not shaped by the policy frameworks that are profoundly changing research dissemination behaviour in other parts of the world. We define open access and account for its rise by two quite different routes. We then present a case study of journal publishing at one South African university to identify existing journal publishing practices in terms of open access. This case provides the springboard for considering the implications – both positive and negative – of global open access trends for South African – and other – research and researchers. We argue that academics' engagement with open access and scholarly communication debates is in their interests as global networked researchers whose virtual identities and online scholarship are now a critical aspect of their professional engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into South African students' digitally mediated learning and social practices revealed a subgroup termed 'digital strangers,' students lacking both experience and opportunities, who had barely used a computer and who did not have easy access to technology off campus. Using a Bourdieun framework, this group's technological habitus and access to capital were considered within the field of higher education. There was a focus on two forms of cultural capital: embodied cultural capital, specifically disposition and values; and objectified cultural capital especially computers and cell phones. Social capital-in terms of personal connections and the values of those close to the students-was also considered. The investigation showed a complex technological habitus, with a paucity of access and limited practices in relation to computers, while computers and their associated practices are highly valued within higher education Simultaneously, diverse practices and widespread indications of astute use of cell phones were described even though these remained under-acknowledged both by the students and the institutions in which they operated. Students recognised what the field of higher education valued, but they also used what they had available in order to best operate within the field. The findings point to a contradiction between students' practices and the field of higher education yet also show how student practices with an alternative form of objectified capital are pushing the boundaries of the field itself. Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic There is increasing agreement in the literature that the concept of students as 'digital natives' with good access to and 'innate' understanding of technology is a myth. Students across a range of contexts have varied skills, experience and interest in using technology., There is some research on the non-use of computers, but it does not tend to relate to mobile use., There is a great deal of recent literature on mobile use in education both in the UK and in South Africa. This is of special interest in developing country contexts where access to computers is still limited but access to the cell phone is widespread., What the paper adds The paper makes the link between computer use and mobile use. By unpacking the complexities of technological habitus. it shows how students who lack computer experience and opportunities navigate the complexities of using information and communication technologies (ICTs) at university., The paper shows how Bourdieu's theory of capital and habitus provides a useful lens for examining the challenges of ICT practices within the field of higher education. Through the concepts of cultural capital and social capital, the paper shows how students who would traditionally be considered non-users have access to forms of capital which they leverage, thus demonstrating student agency., The findings point to a contradiction between students' practices and the field of higher education in that cell phones are widely used as a core ICT resource yet under-acknowledged as a medium of learning by universities. The paper does this by providing empirical examples of cases of complex access and use rarely studied., Implications for practice and/or policy The findings for institutions imply that universities should take student access to and use of cell phones much more seriously, exploiting the cultural and social capitals student are able to draw on. This provides a way of focusing on existing literacies which is preferable to the deficit model which currently prevails., There are implications for curriculum, courses and resource designers in terms of designing learning interventions which utilise mobile technology affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most common problems of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in education is to base choices on technological possibilities rather than educational needs. In developing countries where higher education is fraught with serious challenges at multiple levels, there is increasing pressure to ensure that technological possibilities are viewed in the context of educational needs. This paper argues that a central role of educational technology is to provide additional strategies that can be used to address the serious environmental and educational challenges faced by educators and students in higher education. The educational needs manifest in South African universities include addressing general lack of academic preparedness, multilingual needs in English medium settings, large class sizes and inadequate curriculum design. Using case studies from one higher educational institution, this paper shows how specific and carefully considered interventions using ICTs can be used to address these teaching and learning concerns. These examples serve to demonstrate some ways in which teaching and learning may be enhanced when uses of educational technology are driven by educational needs. The paper concludes that design of educational technology interventions should be driven by educational needs within the context of a broader teaching and learning strategy which requires buy-in of both educators and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article locates and describes the work of the Multimedia Education Group (MEG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). This work is contextualised by three national and international challenges, these being (1) the need to increase access to new technologies and overcome the digital divide, (2) the need to respond to a new communication order, and (3) the urgency of transforming higher education in post-apartheid South Africa. Operating in a fragmented policy environment, MEG has focused on developing educationally appropriate low-cost interventions, supporting academically disadvantaged students, and understanding the relationship between online and contact educational interventions. MEG's experiences suggest that this kind of emergent work requires new ways of working, contributing to transformation within the institution itself. The work also creates epistemological challenges because it is interdisciplinary and because educational technology is a field that is not yet firmly established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses students' use of computers in the University of Cape Town's (UCT) "walk-in" laboratories. In a time of decreasing resources for higher education, South African universities are required to respond to the myriad inequities of the past while simultaneously ensuring participation in an information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled future. As pressure mounted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) to extend student access to computer laboratories, build bigger and better laboratories, wire residences, improve networks and provide faster computers, students were asked what they do with the computers they already have access to, and whether they are using those computers to support their learning. 1,023 students were observed of whom 56% were female and 44% male. Most were undergraduates, only 14% were postgraduates. Given that there are few facilities available only to postgraduates, this suggests they are more likely to have their own computers at home than undergraduates. Given the primary interest of the researchers in using computers to support students' learning, this survey flagged for them important areas of concern, suggested topics for further research, and clarified for them where useful interventions can be made.

This article discusses the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Multimedia Education Group (MEG). It is no coincidence that MEG is situated in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED). CHED, a cross-faculty structure with faculty status, is responsible for educational development across the institution for students and staff alike. The structure is an external manifestation of an approach, which regards educational development as holistic and systemic. CHED recognizes that South Africa's complex history means that a higher education institution such as UCT now teaches students from a range of schooling systems as well as a diversity of languages, class backgrounds, nationalities and so on. Addressing such diversity becomes intrinsic to the educational process and forms part of the fabric of the institution and indeed, of the curriculum itself. It is clear that educational imperatives drive MEG's work. Technology interventions require insightful pedagogical understanding as well as innovative low-cost solutions.