Title:
Technology should not stop us trusting students
Author:
Sioux Mckenna, Professor of Higher Education & Director of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa
Published:
Rhodes University, South Africa, 21 September 2021
From the news article:
Since our rapid pivot to emergency online teaching, we have been captured by discussions about the digital divide.
Where I work, in South Africa, this has been primarily focused on access to hardware and software. Given that few students have personal computers or the funds for internet access, the pandemic has brought about a logistical nightmare for university managers. Even after mass orders of laptops had been placed and free access to a few educational sites had been negotiated with service providers, some students in rural areas were left behind because no signal reaches the villages to which they returned when campuses closed.