The South African Civil Society Information Service

Has UNISA Got Too Big for Its Boots?

By Glenn Ashton · 15 May 2012

Picture: Rendition's Tune

UNISA, the University of South Africa, has established an excellent reputation over its 138-year history. Even during apartheid it served everyone in the country through its open distance education model. Many past and present leaders earned their degrees whilst incarcerated for anti-apartheid activities, this fact recently receiving praise from President Zuma. There are still prisoners within the corrections system receiving UNISA tuition. UNISA extends the possibility to realise our individual potential.

UNISA has not only a national, but a global reach with students on every continent. However around 95% of its students are from within South Africa. It is presently ranked as the 7th best University in Africa. This proud record is a challenge to live up to, especially in a shrinking, increasingly connected world.

The Internet is a tool, which is of obvious benefit to UNISA’s model of education, yet this is a transition filled with pitfalls. It appears that the university administration has failed to fully capitalise on the opportunities and possibilities of enhancing their service through electronic communications.

As South Africa’s biggest university, UNISA accounts for more than a third of all university students in the country. It ranks amongst the world’s 20 mega-universities by numbers of enrolled students. The institution has expanded significantly since its 2004 amalgamation with Vista University and Technikon Southern Africa, increasing enrolment figures from around 250 000 to over 400 000 students in 2011.

Questions are being asked, mainly from within the student body, as to whether this expansion has come at the cost of good governance, efficient administration and consistent standards. Despite maintaining its good reputation, problems have begun to appear in how the institution relates and responds to the student body.

Many graduates speak glowingly of the institution. UNISA has certainly been essential in enabling a broad swathe of society to access opportunities to participate in otherwise inaccessible higher educational possibilities. The reasonable price structures means the average cost is around a third of regular university tuition. Subsidies are also available through the National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).

During Thabo Mbeki’s term of office the university was ideologically linked to the concept of the African Renaissance. This endures institutionally through UNISA’s Institute for African Renaissance Studies.

UNISA has also expanded by building relationships within the African Union (AU). In 2007 the university opened its first major extra-national node in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Additional expansion has been constrained by limited available resources. However national nodes within South Africa have been upgraded. Internet access has been enhanced in the seven national hubs in the major cities, as well as within its 28 learning centres where counselling, learning space and other facilities are offered.

Despite these positive developments there appear to be fundamental concerns with university administration. An increasing sense of frustration seems to have emerged amongst students through an apparent failure to resolve administrative issues at several levels. 

Many students enrolled at UNISA, some already qualified at other tertiary institutions, have expressed disquiet around an unresponsive administration. Because UNISA is a distance learning institution these difficulties are harder to resolve than would otherwise be the case. And while these problems are certainly not universal, they appear to be sufficiently widespread to be of concern.

In mid 2011 the university unilaterally stopped its call centre operation, supposedly to improve communications - and presumably to reduce costs as well. While imperfect, many considered the system to be central to the ease of dealing with the university. Voice contact provided a human dimension to distance education as well. The call centre was replaced by an expanded and updated SMS and email communication system, as well as an electronic assignment submission system.

The problem, inherent to the very nature of electronic communications, is that many enquiries are either unanswered for unacceptably long periods, or are never properly resolved at all. Submitted documents get lost or are forwarded to the incorrect departments. The result is that they must be re-sent, sometimes repeatedly. It is also alleged that queries to tutors or lecturers are not responded to.

These obstacles and hardships undermine the primary objective of the university - to provide a readily accessible means of education to people unable to participate in conventional tertiary education. Many UNISA students are isolated and ill resourced.

The frustrations experienced by bureaucratically experienced post-graduate students must be far more dismaying for inexperienced rural freshmen. This is magnified by the harsh reality of travelling long distances to communication nodes to pay a premium to access email or fax facilities, or to be repeatedly impeded by administrative blunders.

The degree of the problem is evident when browsing some of the whinge-websites like HelloPeter.com. UNISA receives disproportionate numbers of complaints, most of which remain unresolved. Those receiving responses generally get a stock reply. Over the past 12 months UNISA received 2130 complaints and responded to only 177 of these. No other educational institution has a complaint rate approaching this.

These complaints probably represent the tip of the iceberg. A minority have even heard of HelloPeter.com; fewer still have the means to access it. Worse yet, all of these complaints emanate from within South Africa – how many of the thousands of external students have no available channel to voice their concerns? Research has found unhappiness with UNISA both in neighbouring countries as well as further afield.

UNISA’s stock responses to a tiny proportion of complaints through public complaint websites are certainly not the correct manner to deal with administration problems or student dissatisfaction. Students urgently require far more transparent and accessible internal means of resolving these issues.

At the very least, the university should establish a clearinghouse, where complaints are logged and remain in the system until they can be shown to have been satisfactorily resolved. It may also be useful to create an institution like a university ombudsman to solve more serious or intractable concerns. The university claims to be dealing with these concerns but this will almost certainly be too late for some.

If these very real administrative issues are not dealt with UNISA stands to suffer serious reputational damage. In these interconnected times it is as easy to utilise the Internet as a tool to deal with these issues as it is for dissatisfaction to spread virally across the web. It is important for the University leadership to remember that it is far easier to damage a reputation than it is to regain trust, which has been established over many decades.

In order to fulfil its mandates UNISA needs to tap into an increasingly interconnected world to facilitate its outreach and distance learning. This is an institution whose success hinges upon efficiently administering its far-flung student body in properly structured and managed ways. UNISA has a profound responsibility to manage its expansion and help wake the sleeping African giant. As an abiding institution, a well-run UNISA can provide an excellent showcase for South African education across the continent and the world.

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