The Dreams Plan: A Blupoint Strategy for e‐Education Provision in South Africa

Abstract

Since 2004, the government of South Africa has issued a number of white papers calling for the development of a national e-education strategy. A recent study published in this journal (Mooketsi & Chigona, 2014) suggests that the current e-education strategy is not working for many communities in South Africa. This paper presents an alternative e-education strategy for South Africa known as the DREAMs plan (Digital Resources for Education And Mobility). The DREAMs plan proposes the following three conjectures. First, offline platforms are more important than online platforms for building a sustainable SA e-education strategy. Second, mobile technologies are more important than non-mobile technologies for building a sustainable SA e-education strategy. Third, sideloading cultures are more important than downloading cultures for building a sustainable SA e-education strategy. The paper finishes with some final thoughts on the place of dreaming and dreamers in the wider development agenda.

Business model framework for education technology entrepreneurs in South Africa

“…A telecommunications provider, especially a mobile network operator, can provide the underlying technology enablement for EdTech in an emerging economy that has a lack of infrastructure. Education technology is more accessible to learners over mobile networks (Walls et al 2015) -even more so if data usage is not charged.…”

Digital platforms for development: Foundations and research agenda

“…As a result, a large number of the studies reviewed concentrated on platforms that relied on relatively basic technologies such as SMS (Ogutu et al, 2014), voice (Moitra et al, 2018) or simple websites (Verkijika & Wet, 2018) to guarantee access among the targeted users. Some papers also highlighted the importance of offline and alternatives technologies in order to reach the set objectives (Moitra et al, 2018;Walls et al, 2015). For example, in their study on community mobilisation in India, Moitra et al (2018) remark on the role of simple voice-based technologies to effectively broaden access to poor and marginalised communities into the platform, obviating the need for users to have a data connection or a smartphone.…”

Innovation in the undergraduate microelectronics programmes at the University of Southampton

“…While the academic supervisor monitors the students' progress and advises them on the assessment of the GDP, it is the industrial customer that specifies its topic and requirements. These are typically informed by and contributes to the activities of the industrial customer, which range from spin-outs of ECS [9], to multi-national corporations. This year, the industrial customers include Head Communications, ARM, KBR, City Farm Systems, SPI Lasers, Interdigital Technology and Synote.…”