The fifth of a series of ASSAf Presidential Roundtables moderated by ASSAf’s President, Prof Jonathan Jansen, took place virtually on 28 May 2020. This roundtable on Technology and the Future of Higher Education brought together leading experts on the subject to present ideas on what universities might look like in a post-COVID-19 world.

The pandemic has fundamentally altered the future of universities in one crucial respect: the mode of delivery of education. This new reality presents many different challenges including the fact that the technological infrastructure for online learning is unevenly spread across universities; the massive investments by the state in residential complexes on campuses now appears to be redundant; and the state of technological innovation has not been able to address the problem of the professions e.g. what to do with clinical training in medicine or student teacher internships in education?

Panellists at the roundtable were:

Prof Ruksana Osman, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
Prof Laura Czerniewicz, Director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
Mr Stafford Masie, General Manager of WeWork South Africa.