Abstract:

South African higher education institutions (SAHEIs) are confronted with rapidly changing environment which requires them to develop new ways of thinking and making decisions. These challenges include decision with regards to student attrition and retention, dropout rates, student funding and calls for free education among others. To step up to these challenges and remain relevant to future students, SAHEIs should know and understand their students and their learning needs. SAHEIs traditionally used BI Technologies and applications to address these some of these challenges. Unfortunately, BI alone seem not be complete or enough to provide adequate analysis and therefore draws a need to look into unstructured data through analysing structured and unstructured data that is collected from different learning sources and apply new technologies including among others, Neural Networks, Big Data Artificial Intelligence, etc.

The paper seeks to assess a Context-Aware model application in the Open Distance Learning and to address or deal systematically with issues associated with access to data used in business intelligence (BI) applications. In the paper the study thus attempts to show how important it is for business intelligence as enabler in enhancing the management of information that is needed in strategic decision-making processes at the University of South Africa and the higher education landscape in South Africa in general (Bleazard, D (2016:167).

The paper in conclusion supports the literature that suggests that if there are numerous systems, individuals would fail to embrace BI systems since they will have to learn to apply several systems at once (Strand et al., 2017; Sherman, 2015).

Keywords:

Higher Education, Open Distance e-learning, Business Intelligence (BI), Big Data (BD), Management Information Systems (MIS).