Higher Education in the Face of a Global Pandemic

The book reflects on the extent to which the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic influenced the education system in Africa, notably South Africa. The advent of the pandemic has brought a new context to the challenges of access, deepening the precarious position of African higher education systems. The pandemic underscored that African higher education systems are fragile and not uniformly resilient. The book discusses the challenges created or further entrenched by COVID-19 and how the typology of inequality across the differentiated institutions impacted the management of education delivery during COVID-19. Per se, lessons learned were documented to inform decision-making and practice while drawing conclusions for future usage. Even though the shift to emergency remote teaching was not foreseen and thus not coordinated, the authors argue that students’ learning styles, perceptions of online learning and digital pedagogy should be considered in the post-COVID-19 curricula development processes.