Although online distance education provides adult learners with an opportunity for lifelong learning, technology-enabled learner support remains a challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced additional complications. The purpose of the current study was to determine which form of technology-enabled academic learner support students would prefer,…

Assessing service quality gaps in Open Distance Learning (ODL) universities is essential to promote quality and develop programmes to manage deficiencies. The purpose of this study was to compare students' expectations and perceptions of student support services, to determine service quality gaps. Data were collected from a sample of ODL students…

More and more tertiary institutions are now focusing on the mainstreaming and inclusion of students with disabilities. Some higher education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa have established so-called Disability Units (DUs) to offer specialised services to students with disabilities, to facilitate access and integration of these students at…

Evaluating the quality of students' support services in distance education institutions is vital because by nature Open Distance Learning (ODL) is a high-involvement service industry, with multiple student support service encounters. Most quality evaluation models tend to view quality from the institutional perspective. As a result, little is…

African and coloured students continue to perform poorly both at public schools and institutions of higher learning. There are two main reasons for their weak performance -- a lack of literacy and numeracy skills, and being under-prepared. This article reports on two findings of a study that was conducted at two high schools in the Western Cape…

Resilience can be viewed as successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances (e.g. poverty). This article reports on an investigation of which the primary aim was to establish how additional educational support enhances adolescents' resilience and academic performance. A quantitative approach was followed using two schools.…

The study investigated the relationship between timely graduation and academic and institutional factors for a cohort of Engineering students at a South African university. The sample was restricted to 1595 incoming students beginning during 2009-2011 who were tracked to 2016, allowing for an eight-year graduation period for the initial cohort.…

Since the dawn of democracy, South African universities have seen increased access to higher education from African students, the majority being first-generation students (FGS). This increase to access came with challenges of retention and throughput amongst first-year first-generation African students (FYFGAS). Despite these challenges, there…

The University of South Africa (UNISA) is one of the distance education universities that is shifting from open distance learning (ODL) to open distance e-learning (ODeL). UNISA started as a correspondence institution in the 1950s and it has since evolved into an ODeL university. The aim of this research was to assess and determine the maturity…

The concepts of 'graduateness' and graduate attributes became contested terrain before COVID-19 destabilised even the most assured of shared learning constructions. Indeed, for those of us immersed in the delivery of work-based learning (WBL), this has long been the case. Promotion of reductive notions of 'skills' acquisition to comply neatly with…

This paper explores the argument that to widen participation in higher education, educational institutions should bear a greater responsibility for students' learning. Central to this debate is the notion of 'academic support'. There are many perspectives on what works to scaffold student participation and learning but rarely are the perspectives…

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the lockdown measures that were widely implemented in response to the pandemic forced many of the forms of engagement and activities promoted by student affairs and services staff among students at universities to be curtailed or transformed -- at first, so that they entailed no interpersonal contact and later so that…

This article interrogates an Academic Monitoring and Support system (AMS), which was designed to enhance first-year student progression at a South African University. Institutional research evidence produced through engagement with AMS practitioners and university leadership, analysed through the lens of Systems Thinking, reveals a…

Studying through distance education can be problematic for any student, but it can be worse for rural students for diverse reasons. To ensure that students studying through the open distance learning (ODL) system have an enduring learning experience, ODL builds student support as one of its components. The University of South Africa (Unisa)…

The University of Venda introduced an academic mentoring programme in 2012. The introduction of the programme was in response to the results of a national study that was conducted by Scott, Yeld and Hendry (2007). The study was replicated at institutional level and it yielded similar results that indicated that at least 30% of undergraduate…