Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

2 – Virtual Design Studios
created, and the University is including digital learning
and outreach. The University’s Vision and Mission
statements are available in the Annual Calendar (2007).
Likewise, policy documents committing themselves
to higher education and national development exist in
almost all African and Asian countries. Some are, however,
short of ground realities, mainly due to lack of
financial resources. In Africa, design courses are offered
at several universities in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe,
Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and elsewhere. All
design courses require actual or virtual design environments.
It is, therefore, important that all of them be
aware about evolving technologies and their relevance to
their own developmental priorities.
There are some networks in Africa which become
active every now and then. For example, the Southern
African Regional Universities Association (SARUA, 2005)
is an association for the 63 publicly funded universities
located in the Southern African Development Community
(SADC). SARUA aims are to:
• promote, strengthen, and increase higher education,
training and research through expanded interinstitutional
collaboration and capacity building initiatives
across the region;
• promote universities as major contributors towards
national and regional socio-economic development.
Another well-established network is the African University
Network (AFUNET), also known as the Global
Virtual University (GVU, 2000), which was created as a
practical response to the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS) Plan of Action. It is designed to
enhance the capabilities of African universities to take
advantage of the opportunities associated with the
emergence of global information society, akin to the
National Science Foundation in the US. Despite challenges
of operation, it holds promise to integrate the
African continent into the global information society
and economy. The AFUNET project is currently handled
by the Association of African Universities (AAU),
which has also set up a parallel Research and Networking
Unit.
Developing countries are also catching up with the
emerging pedagogical paradigms. In this aspect, students
appear to be ahead of teachers! One may summarize the
paradigms from the students’ perspective (Thomas, 2007)
as follows:
Students wish to:
• maximize their learning by interaction and
communication with others than by reading
alone. They appear to use all available resources,
particularly the Internet by click-click
and ‘thinking together’.
• become more active, flexible and ubiquitous in
their sociological environment.
• construct new knowledge by engaging in
learning on their own.
It appears that the new type of learner expecting the
learning context to be interactive, collaborative, and
socially exciting, looking for learning materials in flexible
format is already born. This paradigm shift is conducive
to the spread of virtual learning. Once facilities are
made available, students are keen to engage themselves,
even by working beyond their normal timetable.
The University of Botswana, with an enrollment of
15,000, provides a good example of the students’ willingness
for e-learning. Though WebCT was launched in
2002 with only 21 online courses, it did so with considerable
drive by the Centre for Academic Development.
Students began to ask for more online courses, thus
urging lecturers to work, resulting in 450 courses on
WebCT/Blackboard format in 2007. The university is
also moving towards online journals, digital repositories,
and virtual sites in the wake of the digital revolution. In
doing so, academics are keeping abreast of the latest
developments in their fields by accessing information,
writing articles and publishing papers online.
CONVENTIONAL STUDIO ENVIRONMENT
Design practice is a very important component of all
design-related programs, and one or more design studios
should be provided for this purpose. Every student
needs to be allocated a seat in a studio, where he or she
may work any time of the working day.
Figure 2.1 A typical design studio in an institution
Education for a Digital World 25