The Student Representative Council (SRC) at the University of Venda in Limpopo says the process of distributing laptops and other items for online learning to students has not yet started.
The university says the procurement process through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) is underway.
Contact learning has also started for some students.
SRC president Gift Chauke says while the university has been issuing students with tablets since 2016, students still require laptops for online lessons.
“At the University of Venda we are still waiting. The majority of universities have managed to procure and claim from NSFAS but in [the] University of Venda there is no student who has received any gadget. So far, the problem is from our university failing to take responsibility because we can see the government is too slow on this thing,” adds Chauke.
“There is also a possibility that these tenders can collapse again. However, at the University of Venda they always say, they have been distributing tables from 2016. We want to make it clear that we are not talking about tablets, tablets don’t have space, it is not user friendly like a laptop,” explains Chauke.
Earlier this year, the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg allocated 30 GiGabytes of data to students at no cost.
In the video below, Prof Adam Habib explains why online learning is working at Wits:
