Different Shades of Success: Educator Perceptions of Government Strategy on E‐Education in South Africa

Abstract

AbstractIn most literature evaluating ICT4D projects in education, the yard stick used to evaluate ICT implementation in business which seeks to establish value is used. As a result most of the projects are in our opinion, wrongly deemed to have been failed. We propose that a better measure of success should consider the context in which the project exists and the perception of the intended recipients – for example a similar objective measure of project outcome could be perceived differently by people of different economic and social status. In this paper, we will demonstrate this concept by evaluating the perception of success of the implementation of an e‐learning strategy in disadvantaged areas in South Africa. Data for the study was collected through various qualitative means in selected disadvantaged areas of Cape Town. Even though a number of existing evaluations point to general failure of implementation of the e‐learning strategy, our study showed that the teachers in the disadvantaged areas considered the system a success based on the intangible benefits they derived from the implementation. Therefore this paper calls for a different way of evaluating ICT for education systems.