Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic is an external shock that has not only changed the delivery of lectures but how lecturers and students communicated in most universities in the world. The students' population whose communication with lecturers was most impaired during the Covid-19 pandemic were residents in rural locales that had little or no access to Internet connectivity. In this research, we present how the interplay of learning management systems, social networking websites, and post office couriers were used to communicate with university students resident in rural areas in South Africa and Nigeria during the Covid-19 pandemic. We adopted the organisational change theory within the transformative paradigm (TP) to theorise on this research and used participatory Research (PR) lense as a research design. The findings of this research align with United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) strategies to communicate with students during Covid-19 such as online parents conferences, phone calls, messaging groups, email, school website, the online conferencing platform, and social media platforms (Facebook). We conclude by analysing the philosophical approaches for future research on communicating with students during external shocks such as pandemics, climate change, and economic meltdown.

Keywords:

Rurality, communication, social media, Covid-19, UNICEF.