Responsiveness vs. accessibility: pandemic-driven shift to remote teaching and online learning

Abstract

During the first four weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, African countries recognized that the COVID-19 pandemic would be one of the biggest disasters the continent has faced in recent times. The effects of the virus were being felt at unprecedented levels and like all nations in the world, countries in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) were grappling with travel bans and social distancing measures. Through a critical discourse analysis lens, this article examines the tensions and contradictions evident in the excerpts of online news articles and newspaper reports published from March 2020 to September 2020 in the SACU region, focusing on the instructive decision-makers charged with the pandemic-driven technology’s adoption and the impact of these decisions on tertiary students in the region. Central to our argument is that responsiveness should not come at the cost of accessibility as this will have a negative impact on remote teaching and online learning, and further entrench the vicious cycle of epistemic injustice and inequity. The discourse in the media reveals that most universities are heavily reliant on learning management systems in an attempt to save the academic year, while there is evidence of unevenness in the distribution of digital infrastructure which has an impact on economically marginalized students. Beyond digital equity issues, there was a need for differentiated professional development activities for lecturers on technology-enabled pedagogies and e-assessments. Furthermore, there is a need for an in-depth exploratory large-scale research to document user-stories on the emergence of remote teaching in the SACU region in order to develop a service-oriented architecture for digital education in higher education institutions (HEIs).