Transforming South Africa’s Universities of Technology: A Roadmap Through 4IR Lenses

Abstract

Since their birth in the 6thcentury, universities have undergone different forms oftransformations, especially of structural, ideological, and epistemological nature. Recently, theemergence of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has triggered a wave of suchtransformations and just like other industrial revolutions, university management ought to becautious as such transformations could exacerbate existing inequalities between the rich andthe poor students. To this end, a clear roadmap for such a transformation becomes critical.This is the contribution of this paper. We achieve this through a bibliometric analysis of thestate of scientific research into the ‘university transformation’ topic, with a special focus onSouth Africa’s (RSA) context. The content of the identified scientific publications on RSA wasfurther subjected to thematic analysis leading to the revelation that decolonisation,community engagement and structural transformation, are the main research themes. It alsoemerges that RSA universities have not embraced 4IR as a lens through which to pursuetransformation. On the other hand, the RSA government launched the project:“Transformation at Public Universities” during the 2017/18 planning year. Subsequently, alluniversities in the country adopted and rolled out a customised transformation agenda.Among these universities, are the six universities of technology (UoTs), which, for historicalreasons, the transformation project presents unique challenges and opportunities. Createdslightly after the millennium, UoTs are still seen as critical role players in the third missionof universities, that of “achieving economic growth and social progress”. These findings, aswells as the existence of systemic exclusion, marginalisation, and discrimination (especiallyalong racial lines) in RSA universities, defines our proposed roadmap. Using one of the UoTsand Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as the reference, the proposed universitytransformation roadmap is supported by empirical data on the assessment of the readiness ofstudents to adopt 4IR technologies.