Teaching and learning interaction in South Africa’s higher education: Some weak links

Abstract

The quest to get many people into higher education often crowds out the need for quality teaching and learning achievement if not backed up by resources. Narratives of recurrent concerns in the higher education sector include maintaining access to and quality of higher education, achieving a better outcome and reduce the number of students dropping out of institution. Although successes have been achieved in terms of student access to higher education, the same cannot be said of success rate. What is the weak link? How can the misalignment in the educational sector be remedied? Using ordinary least square (OLS) estimation method, empirical analysis revealed that student success depends to a large extent on the quality of input. It was evident from the study that the quantity and quality of research output significantly depend on the quality of academic staff. In view of these, various quality-enhancing investments in facilities and teacher upgrading are needed. More experienced lecturers irrespective of their nationality need to be employed to continually support teaching and learning. The higher education sector needs to internalize the fact of underpreparedness of high school learning graduates and make a proper corrective mechanism to upgrade their skills to contend higher education learning.