Past Calls

Council on Higher Education (CHE)

South Africa

South Africa is a large country with its higher education institutions geographically spread across 9 provinces but with the Council on Higher Education (CHE) as the statutory regulator located in Pretoria. Many rural institutions (such as the University of Zululand, University of Venda and Central University of Technology) have been historically disadvantaged institutions since apartheid times remain the least capacitated and resourced.

The CHE is currently undertaking a themed review of all higher education institutions that were only accredited for the contact mode before the 2020 pandemic, to enable them to also be accredited for the blended and online provision of their qualifications and programmes into the future. The Manual for the Themed Review includes the Criteria to be used for the evaluation during the themed review. These Criteria were derived from the CHE’s Higher Education Practice Standard (HEPS) for Modes of Learning and Teaching Provision which is included in the Manual as an appendix. The HEPS sets out the codes of practice and benchmarking for institutions in how they should approach their intentional design choices, planning, resourcing, programme development and delivery in various modes of provision, including the blended and online modes in a post-pandemic era. The focus was on how to move institutions from the pandemic-related emergency remote teaching and learning to quality designed and delivered programmes in blended and online learning.

This Higher Education Practice Standard on Modes of Learning and Teaching Provision is one of the 16 new Standards that the CHE has been developing through its new processes for Standards Development as described in the Quality Assurance Framework (QAF). See also a presentation on Standards as Codes of Practice. The remaining HEPS are currently in the public domain for public consultation here.

The CHE undertook extensive national capacity development in preparation for the themed review (see for example, the lunch hour webinar), which included capacity development on the HEPS for the Modes of Learning and Teaching Provision.

In this capacity development, the CHE partnered with INQAAHE through an INQAAHE capacity development grant. The focus of the INQAAHE grant was to capacitate historically disadvantaged rural universities in South Africa to engage with the CHE’s Learning and Teaching Provision Standard to enable them to do adequate self-reflection and improvement in anticipation of the CHE’s themed review on Learning and Teaching Practice.

The outcome of the project which was achieved was that the targeted institutions could submit quality SERs and PoEs to support the CHE themed review process. The following institutions were visited with the support of the INQAAHE grant:

• Vaal University of Technology (31 October 2024)
• University of Venda (27 November 2024)
• University of Zululand (12 February 2025)
• Central University of Technology (20 February 2025).

The CHE would like to extend its appreciation to INQAAHE for the capacity development grant that enabled the travel expenses to these rural underserved institutions in South Africa.