Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic poses unparalleled challenges to education systems around the world, all of which have devastating effects. While these effects have been troubling in developing and developed countries, rural education systems in developing countries have particularly been most susceptible to collapse. The unique context of rural universities makes it difficult to implement approaches similar to those implemented in the developed world and/or more urban-based institutions. Underpinned by Von Bertalanffy’s Systems Theory, which argues that organisations are composed of systems that have goals to achieve, this paper thus sought to explore the coping mechanisms instituted at a rural South African university in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. It further sought to establish how the university has managed to cope with the challenges that are unique to rural universities as exacerbated by the onset of the pandemic. Underpinned by a post-positivist paradigm, the study employed a mixed methods approach through which data was collected using online questionnaires and interviews. The findings of the study revealed that although the institution had put some measures in place to ensure that the university is efficiently managed in the context of COVID-19 stringencies, university stakeholders are still faced with insurmountable challenges that range from campus safety, cancellation and postponement of examinations, as well as weakened research and international collaborations. Based on the findings of the study, it is recommended that South African institutions and the government need to invest more on safety infrastructural facilities that will ensure that rural university stakeholders are safe. Furthermore, there is a need for technical infrastructural facilities that enable the shift from conventional assessment, teaching and learning approaches to a more blended educational model.
Highlights
AND BACKGROUNDThe coronavirus pandemic has triggered widespread detrimental effects across all sectors of society, including the higher education sector (Hedding et al, 2020; Fay et al, 2020)
To elicit information regarding the functionality of rural institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, participants were asked questions on school safety, communication infrastructures, partnership and international collaborations
Research findings concerning the impact of COVID-19 on the functionality of rural institutions revealed that institutions of higher learning were reopened amidst the crisis, there were minimal containment measures put in place to curb its spread
Summary
The coronavirus pandemic has triggered widespread detrimental effects across all sectors of society, including the higher education sector (Hedding et al, 2020; Fay et al, 2020). The hasty implementation of lockdowns around the world was proof of the attempts at formulating policies and saving lives (Hedding et al, 2020; Zahra etal., 2020). In March 2020, an unexpected nation-wide lockdown was instituted in line with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations that dissuade physical meetings as a way of curtailing the pandemic in South Africa (Omodan, 2020). Similar to other parts of the world, education institutions in South Africa were forced into an induced lockdown in which all operations, including teaching and learning, were halted abruptly. The effect was compounded for rural institutions that did not ordinarily possess the capacity to provide alternative teaching and learning systems (Ebrahim et al, 2020; Hedding et al, 2020; Roy et al, 2020). Prior to the onset of the pandemic, there had already been calls for the education system in South Africa to adopt online technologies as a response to the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) (Mncube, Olawale & Hendricks, 2019)
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