Balancing Innovation and Privacy: A Framework for Personal Data Protection in AI-Enhanced Higher Education in Africa

The history of women's engagement with the academy has been characterised by exclusion and inequality. Seven decades ago, Virginia Woolf1 asked: Do we want to join the procession or don't we? On wh...

A brief overview of South Africa's higher education history contextualizes this article's examination of how admissions policies and procedures at the University of Cape Town (UCT), an historically White South African university, have been affected by increasing enrollments of Black students since the passage of the 1983 Universities Amendment Act. This is followed by an institutional profile that delineates the specific changes in admissions policies and procedures related to Black students at UCT from 1983 to 1995. Data are presented by race and gender. The article concludes with a critical analysis of UCT's academic development programs and alternative admissions criteria. INTRODUCTION The origins of higher education in South Africa date back to 1829 and the establishment of the University of the Cape of Good Hope-the present-day University of Cape Town (UCT)-and the University of Stellenbosch, founded in 1874. These early institutions of higher learning were established primarily to prepare White males for further educational training abroad. They were modeled after British institutions; their students were White, and their academic staff came primarily from Britain and other European countries. It was not until early in the 20th century, with the passage of the University Act of 1916, that provisions were made for the establishment of the first university for non-White South Africans. That legislation established the South African Native College, now known as the University of Fort Hare, and the University of South Africa, a correspondence university for the nation's Blacks, or its African, Colored, and Indian/ Asian populations. As this article makes plain, the history of South African higher education is intricately bound to and influenced by political developments. Upon assuming leadership in 1948 until the 1994 democratic elections, the National Party (NP) government of the nation's White minority played a decisive role in the development of higher education. With its doctrine of apartheid, the NP introduced the plethora of legislation that systematically entrenched racial segregation at all levels of society, including the educational system. Within five years of taking power, the NP government passed the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which created separate systems of education for Africans, Coloreds, Indians/ Asians, and Whites. This Act was followed by the Universities Amendment Act of 1959 that prohibited the admission of Blacks to historically White universities and established separate universities for Blacks along racial/ethnic lines. Subsequently, between 1951 and 1968, six South African colleges became full-fledged, independent universities serving Whites only: the University of the Witwatersrand (1922), the University of Pretoria (1930), Natal University (1949), the University of the Orange Free State (1950), Rhodes University (1951), and Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1951). Two new Whites-only universities were founded during this period: the University of Port Elizabeth in 1965 and Rand Afrikaans University in 1968 (Muller, 1991). Institutional development in South African higher education also reflected the cultural and linguistic duality of the South African settler population. The Afrikaans-language universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Orange Free State, Potchefstroom, and Rand Afrikaans-became the nucleus of Afrikaner (Dutch Boer) nationalism and cultural consciousness (Booysen, 1989; Gwala, 1988; Marcum, 1982). The English-language universitiesCape Town, Witwatersrand, Rhodes, and Natal-have historically been perceived as politically liberal in the South African context for their strong commitment to the ideals of academic freedom and interracial and interethnic relations (Taylor, 1990; Vale, 1987). The Extension of Universities Act, passed in 1959, set forth provisions for ethnically based institutions of higher learning designed to serve South Africa's African, Colored, and Indian/Asian populations. …

This study of higher education in eight sub-Saharan nations in Africa was built around a research project of the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA). It was initiated by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation (CHET) in 2007 and includes data on these institutions from two different surveys, the second completed in 2013/2014. The study shows a great deal of thought and care in its preparation, a difficult task in its undertaking, data gathering, and presentation, and is an impressive and useful study which will be of interest to most scholars of Africa. It is an important addition to the literature on higher education in Africa. The effort to assess the relationship between higher education and development, economics and democracy in Africa is timely and well-conceived, and provides a wealth of very useful information on higher education in Africa. There has been evidence of this research by Cloete et al. over the last few years and it was with great anticipation that I read the final result of their efforts. It was well worth the wait. The eight higher education institutions that are the focus of this research are in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and provide an excellent representation of the status of higher education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Whether and how higher education in Africa contributes to democratisation beyond producing the professionals that are necessary for developing and sustaining a modern political system, remains an unresolved question. This report, then, represents an attempt to address the question of whether there are university specific mechanisms or pathways by which higher education contributes to the development of democratic attitudes and behaviours among students, and how these mechanisms operate and relate to politics both on and off campus. The research contained in this report shows that the potential of a university to act as training ground for democratic citizenship is best realised by supporting students' exercise of democratic leadership on campus. This, in turn, develops and fosters democratic leadership in civil society. Thus, the university's response to student political activity, student representation in university governance and other aspects of extra-curricular student life needs to be examined for ways in which African universities can instil and support democratic values and practices. Encouraging and facilitating student leadership in various forms of on-campus political activity and in a range of student organisations emerges as one of the most promising ways in which African universities can act as training grounds for democratic citizenship. The project on which this report is based forms part of a larger study on Higher Education and Democracy in Africa, undertaken by the Higher Education Research and Advocacy Network in Africa (HERANA). HERANA is coordinated by the Centre for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa.

Incorporating Virtual Reality aesthetics and semantics can contribute towards transforming the education landscape in both the developed and developing world. This can be realized by VR’s capacity to enable the design of more vibrant and dynamic/interactive multimedia applications that are user centric. VR has a positive impact on e-Learning, which is an emerging education model in Africa. This paper uproots the different initiatives, experiences, and challenges that have been met by various endeavors to employ VR as a tool for education, especially in African universities. Using exploratory approaches, two universities in South Africa and Botswana are reviewed as case studies in order to ascertain the status of VR use in higher education in Africa. The paper finds that the potential of VR education is evident in Africa but needs to be unearthed.

The higher education landscape in South African (SA) has recently experienced a wave of student movement organised under the #MustFall campaign, where students demanded quality and accessible higher education. This movement spoke against the colonial character of the curriculum, demographic representation, institutional cultures, and architecture of the university in South Africa today, which excludes the majority of the students who cannot access higher education in South Africa. It is in this context that the high cost of higher education was questioned, with some questioning the very “idea of the university”, and the role of the university in a society contending with income inequalities, unemployment, and poverty. This article seeks to position food at the centre of decolonising tools towards a sustainable African university of the future. Looking at growing levels of hunger, and the lack of access to food among our students, I argue that in putting food at the centre, regarding our understanding of the curriculum, shape, size, and future of the university in South Africa, we might begin to transform the exclusivist, uncaring and elitist spaces that define a university. In trying to rethink the ‘‘idea of the university’’ in South Africa I look at one of the enduring institutions of knowledge in African societies—uMakhulu (“Senior Mother/Grandmother”) as a body that can reconnect the African university to its matriarchal heritage, in order to define a university that can feed itself beyond the narrow neoliberal understanding of sustainability.

The idea of transformation to a ‘new African university’ has become topical in contemporary African education scholarship. Whilst it is claimed that the process seeks to include all stakeholders, academics with disabilities are excluded because of discourses and dynamics in Africa’s higher education that have remained deeply embedded in Eurocentric thinking and mind-set. This paper applied Critical Disability Theory to analyse the challenges that face academics with disabilities in the areas of teaching, research, community engagement and doctoral supervision in South African higher education and that must be appropriately and adequately addressed for a successful transformation to a “‘new’ African University”. Data were collected through an analysis of South African literature on exclusion of students with disabilities as research, community engagement and supervision are regarded as a continuum and involve both students and the academics. Findings revealed that academics with disabilities are confronted with specific challenges similar to those faced by students with disabilities, as they all function within the same context during transformation to a ‘new African university’. The challenges are inaccessible physical environment, negative attitudes from the community members, impairment-related disadvantages, lack of adequate funding and lack of adequate media for use, which all compound to limit their functioning like their able-bodied counterparts. Including the voice of academics with disabilities in disability policy was proposed as a way to alleviate the challenges they confront enabling them to contribute positively to scholarship and thus affirm the transformation to a new African University

This article examines the expectations, dynamics, and intricacies of academic partnerships and the reality of African academic institutions.

Orientation: The entrepreneurial intentions of students in different faculties of a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa are not known and are not measured. Research purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the entrepreneurial intentions of students in a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa. This study was based on two objectives, namely, to determine the entrepreneurial intention of students in four different faculties in a historically disadvantaged South African university and to assess if significant differences exist between entrepreneurial intentions of students in the four different faculties of a historically disadvantaged South African university. Motivation for the study: Graduate unemployment is on the rise in South Africa. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial intentions of students across faculties in historically disadvantaged institutions are underexplored and needs further testing. This study aims to assess the entrepreneurial intentions of students in a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa. Research design, approach and method: Quantitative research was utilised and 377 students from a historically disadvantaged South African university were surveyed. Simple random sampling technique was utilised in the study. Reliability was measured using Cronbach’s alpha. Mean, standard deviation and Chi-square test were utilised in the data analysis. Main findings: The findings revealed that significant differences exist between the entrepreneurial intentions of students in the four different faculties (health sciences, management and law, humanities as well as science and agriculture). The study also found that the students in the Faculty of Management and Law have a high entrepreneurial intentions. The study focused on one historically disadvantaged university in South Africa; therefore, the findings of this study should be interpreted cautiously for other universities in South Africa. Future research can be replicated in other South African universities. Practical/managerial implications: The findings of this study have implications to policy-makers in higher education and lecturers in South Africa universities. This study recommends entrepreneurial education courses for all students in the universities and policy decisions that allow students to start businesses. This is expected to promote entrepreneurship, employment and economic development in South Africa. Contribution/value-add: The novelty of this study is the contribution to the body of knowledge on entrepreneurial intentions of university students across faculties in South Africa. In addition, studies on entrepreneurial intentions of students from historically disadvantaged universities are underexplored. The study provides useful recommendations on entrepreneurial intention of South African students from a historically disadvantaged university.

South Africa's Higher Education System in Crisis … in a State in Crisis Ahmed C. Bawa (bio) on december 16, 2017, the then-president of south africa, jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, gave his last address as president of the African National Congress (ANC) at the party's 2017 elective conference. The three-day event captured the attention of millions of South Africans, partly as engaging reality TV, but mainly because of its potential impact on the future of this adolescent democracy. At the end of the meeting there would be one of two outcomes: a consolidation of the rent-seeking, corrupt, and corruptive state that had pervaded every level of government in the previous 10 years, or the chance of another start to the South African dream of producing a caring, nurturing, innovative society, bringing to reality the dreams of millions. The unexpected, even shocking centerpiece of Zuma's address at the conference was the announcement of a new system of funding for "students from poor and working-class families" to access higher education (HE) in response to the #FeesMustFall campaign waged by students since August 2015 (Zuma 2017). Universities are social institutions of a special kind. In South Africa, as in other parts of the world, while they protect and reproduce power and privilege, they are also fiercely independent and often the loudest voices of political and social dissent. They are simultaneously global and intensely local; places of construction and deconstruction of national imaginations; powerful engines for social mobility and the construction of a more equitable society; and central to the creation [End Page 253] of South Africa's democracy. They are both witness to and participants in the emergence of a human-centered society carrying the hopes of most of its citizens after hundreds of years of devastating oppression. The recent crisis that overtook the HE system between 2015 and 2017 is an interesting prism through which to understand some of the dynamics of the last 24 years of South Africa's faltering adventure into democracy. Between 1994 and 2016, the number of students in the HE system grew from fewer than 500,000 to more than a million, the largest part of the growth being driven by the broadening and deepening participation of black South Africans. By 2016, some 74 percent of students in the 26 public universities were black, and the shift in enrollments over the past 24 years has had an enormous influence on the universities (CHE 2018). Their role in social mobility may be garnered from the fact that 20–30 percent of students receive financial aid, which means they are from families with a gross annual income of less than R122,000 (about $8,500; NSFAS 2018). Issues of food insecurity, deep inequality, and social justice are firmly on the agendas of all South Africa's universities and are major causes of high incompletion rates (Letseka and Breier 2008). The HE crisis has unique aspects, but it is also fully connected to the general crisis in national development. Interestingly, this is happening at a time when the performance of the universities has, over the last 5–10 years, improved significantly in terms of the usual metrics by which HE is measured. While the student upheavals were initially directed at the objective of establishing a free-HE-for-all system, this was supplemented very significantly by the additional demand for "decolonized, quality education"—a much more qualitative demand that focused on the perceived orientation of the knowledge project of the university system. There is significant conceptual and practical overlap between the student activism and contemporary community struggles that occur daily. [End Page 254] SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION POST-1994 Following the transition in 1994, President Nelson Mandela signed into existence the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) with very broad social representation, including leaders of universities, the business/industry sector, the trade union structures, and civil society organizations. The idea was to produce a new framework for HE consonant with the vision of the new democratic state, to provide it with a policy infrastructure that would help it to reshape its purposes in a transforming society. These were captured in the Education White Paper 3...

In recent timesE-learning receives greater attention among educational practitioners. All over the world, many institutions of higher learning are using E-learning as a supplementary tool to the traditional ways of teaching and learning. Covid-19 pandemic has forced institutions all over the world to adopt E-learning as the preferred mode of teaching and learning. Though many African universities have adopted E-learning as a response to Covid-19 pandemic, success of it, in particular among the institutions located in rural settings depends heavily on the e-readiness factor of the learners these institutions enrol at undergraduate levels. Though most universities in South Africa implemented E-learning, little is known about E-learning readiness in formerly under-privileged universities. Walter Sisulu University (WSU) is a higher education institutions situated in the Eastern cape province which is considered as one of the disadvantaged provinces with very low CT penetration. This selected institution predominantly enrols students who are hailing from the rural and townships population of the province with schools that are characterised by lack of essential ICT infrastructure and teachers with basic computer skills though a very low percentage of the student population constitute students from other provinces and countries outside South Africa. This research study investigated the readiness of learners enrolled at level-one of undergraduate programmes in WSU to use E-learning as tool to enhance their learning. Keywords: E-learning, African rural University, technological readiness

Purpose The purpose of this study to investigate the relationships between South Africa (SA) universities and universities surrounding communities (USC) for preserving community histories and serve the universities’ mandate to support their local communities and support universities’ teaching and scholarship. Design/methodology/approach The study used a multiple case study approach through interviews. The population of the study comprised representatives from selected universities and their USC. Findings The findings revealed a lack of effective relationships between universities and USC to preserve communities’ histories. Hence, the communities’ archives are tools for teaching and scholarship. Relations between universities and USC are to be built on trust. Accountability and transparency are to be considered by both parties. Research limitations/implications The research is limited to selected SA universities, namely, University of Venda, Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Pretoria and SA and USC. The findings are applicable to all SA universities and USC. Practical implications The relationship between universities and USC has a practical impact on the National archives of South Africa (NARSSA) to collect communities archives because it is in conflict with the mandate of NARSSA. The National Archives’ Act 43 of 1996 obliged NARSSA to collect and preserve communities’ archives on behalf of societies. Social implications Lack of universities and USC can lead to the loss of communities histories or archives. Originality/value This paper appears to be the first to research the relationship between SA universities and USC.

This article seeks to delve deeper into the discourse about the epistemic decoloniality of Westernised higher education in South Africa. Discrete academic studies have indicated that African Knowledge paradigms have not found a home in South Africa’s Westernised academies yet; knowledge patterns remain foreign and colonized. The current curriculum at a section of Historically White Universities in South Africa largely reflects the colonial and apartheid worldviews and is disconnected from African realities, including the lived experiences of most black South Africans, taking into account Arts and Humanities. Based on an examination of the decoloniality project and curriculum dishonesty and reform through literature study, the article calls for critical rethinking and reconfiguration, which should position South Africa, Africa, and last of all, the globe at the centre of knowledge production. Epistemic decoloniality at South Africa’s Historically White Universities should not be pursued with knowledge violence but rather with scholarly debate. This article introduces the framework of decoloniality by tracing the genesis of (South) Africa’s knowledge coloniality and initiates a discussion on the current epistemic decoloniality in South Africa’s Westernised higher education. The focus is on curriculum justice and knowledge integration across Historically White Universities in South Africa. The last portion of the paper applies the proposed measures to evaluate the cogency of decolonial discourses.

This paper argues for the notion of African identity to be placed at the centre of creating a new African university as part of the education decolonisation project. Defining the African university does not mean a total negation of Western ideas and epistemologies, but rather the foregrounding of African identity, traditions and culture. The paper recognises that Africa is part of a global economy, hence African university curricula must (among other phenomena) be responsive to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), pandemics and climate change. Drawing on recent African identity-driven curriculum transformation developments at four South African universities, the paper recognises differences in institutional initiatives, some with detailed curriculum transformation plans and others with no clear plans. Based on a literature review and document analysis methods, the results suggest that progress in curriculum transformation is mediated by context and history, as well as differences in institutional commitment to the decolonisation education project. The authors suggest that – with support from government and policymakers – a clear and detailed programme of curriculum transformation is needed, underpinned by a moral imperative to foreground African identity in the transition to the new African university.

Globalization has played a significant role in redefining the role and identity of higher education institutions across the world and universities in developing are no exception. Education policies in many developing countries have historically favored and funded the development of basic education; however there has been a gradual shift in national policies towards investing in higher education sector. This chapter is based on a qualitative study that examines how the intersection of gender, socio-cultural factors, and organizational culture impact professional experiences of women academics selected public universities in Ghana and South Africa. Given the glaring absence of women in academic positions across many African universities, particularly at senior ranks, this study seeks to provide an understanding of challenges and opportunities that influence the upward mobility of women academics/academic leaders and the strategies these women have employed to persist in academic contexts that are not always supportive.