Our Background

The Regional Model Symposium was conceptualised during the 2022 University of South Africa (UNISA) Registrar’s Portfolio peer-review/quality audit exercise. The quality peer-review audit was conducted by a panel of experts drawn from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Tanzania. During the peer review exercise, the panel discussed the need for UNISA to engage more with other universities that offer programmes through Open Distance and e-learning (ODeL), for the purposes of:

• Networking and strengthening Higher Education (HE) quality assurance enhancement activities across universities in the region and Africa
• Contributing towards building a Quality Assurance (QA) community of practice in the ODeL space
• Conducting regular symposiums on sharing experiences (innovations) regarding the deployment of ODeL regional campus approaches/models in delivering the university academic project and student support services
• Inspiring strong collaborations, connections and building a network of inter-institutional audits that would lower the prohibitive costs of contracting QA consultants. Such measures would promote low-cost quality assurance undertaking that low resourced universities would afford hence creating an inclusive approach to QA through inter-institutional audits/peer reviews, affording the entire African continent to benchmark good regional model practices.

The above culminated in the first symposium being jointly hosted by Botswana Open University (BOU) and  UNISA, Basically, the joint hosting of the symposium was part of implementing their respective internationalisation strategies and partnership. Further it fostered benchmarking on regional model structures, and systems in the light of the fast-changing teaching and learning environment due to several factors such as the impact of the disruptive technologies, including artificial intelligence, the novel COVID-19 pandemic, which ushered in the new ways of doing things, the changing learner profiles with new diverse expectations and needs, the need to contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – that is not leaving anyone behind, be it the learner or the educator, and the emergence and demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR).

The symposium involved the sharing and the interrogation of nine case studies from universities from Botswana, the Caribbean, India, Namibia, South Africa, Turkey, UK, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Further, the symposium had two official opening Remarks from the hosting institutions, BOU and UNISA and it also had two keynote speeches with discussants, and a roundtable discussion on reflections on the regional models delivered by speakers from participating universities.