Free university - online

30 Sep 2016

A social entrepreneur has worked up a blueprint for a solution for the higher education fees crisis: the University of Everywhere, complete with a mass graduation party at Pretoria's Loftus Versfeld stadium.

The current education funding model, where students have to pay for education, is not suitable for a poor third-world country like South Africa, Ian McDonald told the fees commission sitting in Centurion yesterday, 29 September 2016.

The commission is investigating the feasibility of free higher education. McDonald argued that free higher education was affordable, but not under the current university model, so it had to "change to suit South Africa".

McDonald's idea is a platform where the current 26 universities would provide courses online to be accessible to everyone, everywhere, any time and free.

In his University of Everywhere, lectures are recorded and loaded onto a system which feeds into centres based in 20,000 communities across the country.

"There were 20,000 voting stations in the last elections that reached everyone so the university is guaranteed to be within everybody's reach at no travel and accommodation costs," McDonald said.

He said Africa's distance education giant Unisa had already moved its courses online, reaching its students wherever they were in the world.

The University of Everywhere seeks to supplement the current university system.

"It will not be an academic institution, but a platform where universities present courses online," he said.

The franchised model could see community learning centres placed in fully equipped, prefabricated steel structures.

This would also create business opportunities for unemployed youth in the area.

Each structure would have 44 free workstations with free devices, free university courses and free data.

McDonald envisions the University of Everywhere could create 100,000 jobs and benefit 800,000 dependants.

Each franchise would cost about R80,000 to start up, with the initial funding capital coming from the government, businesses and donors. He said the idea was a solution that would save the country billions of rands and ensure targets of 1.62-million tertiary students enrolled by 2030.

A separate presentation by a student organisation pointed out to the fees commission that free education for all had the potential to collapse South Africa's higher education sector as it would result in flooding the sector with students that were not academically inclined.

The SA Further Education and Training Student Association, an independent student body championing the interest of technical and vocational education and training college students, submitted that higher education could only be free for those who were financially needy and academically deserving.

Source: The Times

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