Abstract:

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization upgraded the outbreak of COVID-19 to pandemic status. Governments around the world, including the ones in southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe), put in place public health emergency measures such as restriction or ban of non-essential face-to-face interactions in confined spaces, curfews, and lockdowns to contain and control the spread of the virus. This caused a halt to the physical learning process, with a need to move away from using the usual face-to-face pedagogical methodologies and adopt innovative instructional strategies which integrate digital technologies. This is a concept paper that reviewed the literature on the significance of digital transformation in empowering remote learning in times of crisis in Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. These four countries were purposively selected as they play an integral part in the education sector in southern Africa. Data were obtained from secondary sources. The findings are that, in southern Africa, during the lockdown, a variety of technological tools were used in primary and secondary education where educational activities switched to remote (online) learning. These tools include the use of zero-rated applications such as television, radio, digital schools using zoom and google classroom, and some educational websites. The findings show that remote learning was the best method to give learners access to education and to enable participation, although it had some specific issues and challenges, including unfamiliarity with new technology and methods of dealing with unknown, poor or no infrastructure, higher drop-out rates, and lowered academic achievement level. From the findings, we conclude that the southern African education sector massively adopted digital transformation from primary to secondary education, although some challenges were identified. The study presents an integrated framework on digital transformation for primary and secondary schools in southern Africa that could be implemented to empower remote learning in times of crisis. The framework is likely to be feasible and of benefit to the countries that are struggling to balance the education sector amid the new normal which is remote learning.

Keywords:

Digital transformation, education, learners, Southern Africa, COVID-19, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Botswana.