JONATHAN JANSEN | UCT’s online school: Admirable maybe. Equal opportunity? Definitely not

When I first learnt about the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) new online school I was very excited and did an immediate “shout out” for the initiative to my 122,000+ Twitter followers. After all, there are so few bright new ideas about how to change the education futures of schoolchildren, especially from our 26 public universities. Then I took a closer look and, to be honest, I am no longer as enthusiastic about this much-heralded innovation.

Let me start, though, by making clear that our universities have a long tradition of working with schools out of a sense of public duty and pure self-interest — we need well-prepared pupils as first-year enrolments. Stellenbosch University has a celebrated telematics programme that has opened opportunities for “geographically dispersed students”. The University of the Free State (UFS) engaged in a huge schools turnaround programme that targeted principal leadership alongside the deployment of expert teachers as in-classroom partners to regular teachers to improve learning in science and mathematics. The University of Johannesburg (UJ) has two schools — the UJ Metropolitan Academy for disadvantaged pupils, recently designated as a “high tech and innovation” focus school, and the Funda UJabule Primary School on its Soweto campus that also serves as a live training centre for teachers (like hospitals give practise training to medical students). Wonderful, the more the merrier. Or is it?

First, the UCT online initiative is a private school. You pay and the partnering company makes a profit it shares with our premier university. R2,000 a month for full participation in the school might sound reasonable for the middle classes, but domestic workers and gardeners do not earn that kind of money. So let’s not pretend this school is for the poor or that it will bridge inequalities in society. It is a for-profit initiative that will only exist to the extent that there are margins the company can live with.

There is an overcrowded graveyard of private education initiatives, including a very prominent one that simply ran out of philanthropic goodwill.

Nor is it clear to me that the online school is sustainable. The private sector might come on board with bursaries in the beginning, but it has a record of going lukewarm and then cold as the flash flattens in the pan. Apart from bursaries, you have to pay attractive salaries to outstanding teachers who are the key to the success of the plan. Where is all of this money going to come from year after year?

There is an overcrowded graveyard of private education initiatives, including a very prominent one that simply ran out of philanthropic goodwill (Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson and so on), even while a former president’s wife was the chancellor. For a private school to excel, it needs to make money, lots of it.

Here comes the problem of scale. How many pupils can such an initiative absorb given one of its components involves what it calls micro-schools? Local facilities, such as churches, are used to give some online pupils a physical place where they can meet tutors to assist and guide their learning in person. About 5,000 pupils is an initial projection the planners work with. That, of course, is a drop in the bucket as far as reach is concerned, given 13-million children in the school system.  More than reach, those types of numbers do not make appreciable profits over time.

What does R2,000 a month buy? Here the company is honest. This is a bare-bones curriculum which is intended to get pupils over the line in terms of academic results. What you will not get is a wholesome curriculum, the types of things that make us human, such as music, drama, sports, physical education, excursions, choir — things you remember about a full educational experience long after you forget the mass of plutonium or the different uses of the inverted comma.

Where the full exclusionary effects of the online school will be felt is in its mode and methods of teaching. Most children need sustained contact with in-person teachers in school settings that allow for real interaction. There is a social class divide when it comes to the efficacy of learning online versus face-to-face. In our book Learning under Lockdown, the thing that stands out in the stories of children is the dependence of especially poor and working-class pupils on physically present teachers in live classrooms for their success. Children do not only go to school for cognitive gain, that much is clear. In short, online learning, however construed, is based on middle-class sensibilities (data, devices, learning spaces, quiet areas in the home and so on).

UCT must be commended for thinking outside the box with this courageous initiative. But let’s not pretend this online school levels the playing fields when it comes to educational inequality. It might make it worse.