2030 and beyond

The 2030 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Agenda highlights the critical importance of education in nurturing an equitable and sustainable future. Quality education is an essential catalyst for positive transformation in building prosperous societies and Information Communication Technology (ICT) plays a big role in enabling this reality. With 2030 as the target, an assumption can be that advanced progress has been made, however, that is not the case. UNESCO (2020) reported that over 260 million children globally were still not able to access and complete their education. This daunting reality inspired our selection of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) four so that we can gain deeper insights into the challenge at hand.

​

The Department of Basic Education (DBE) (2004) defines e-learning as an interactive learning space between teachers and learners in an online environment using technological resources such as the internet and other hardware and software information technological tools that assist this process.

​

To align with the UN’s SDG four, the South African government through the DBE rolled out ICT resources to enable e-learning. The objective of this rollout was to gradually improve teachers’ impact and learners’ cognition, with hopes of improving performance as an outcome and simultaneously redressing past inequalities (Graham et al., 2020). However, Dlamini and Rafiki (2022) highlight that less than 36% of teachers with ICT access are adopting the use of e-learning as a method of teaching.

​

The objective of our research is to:

• identify the barriers to e-learning adoption;

• establish effective ways to overcome the identified barriers; and

• establish means to improve e-learning adoption by teachers.

​

Upon completion of the project, we hope to develop a feasible and sustainable business proposal that aligns with the SDG measurable indicator, without addressing the hardware access challenges.

 

References:

​

Department of Education. (2004). Draft White Paper on e-Education. Government Gazette of the Republic of South Africa, 470. https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/267341.pdf

​

Dlamini, R., & Rafiki, M. (2022). Teachers' Perspectives on the Integration of Information and Communication Technology: The Case of a Teachers' Union.  Africa Education Review, 19(1), 34-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/18146627.2023.2181728

​

Graham, M. A., Stols, G., & Kapp, R. (2020). Teacher practice and integration of ICT: Why are or aren’t South African teachers using ICTs in their classrooms. International Journal of Instruction, 13(2), 749–766. https://doi.org/10.29333/iji.2020.13251a

​

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). (2020). Sustainable Development Goals. UNESCO. Retrieved March 2, 2024, from http://data.uis.unesco.org/

​

​United Nations. (2024). The sustainable development goals report 2024. United Nations Statistics Division. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2024/