Recommendations for sustainable post COVID-19 eLearning development in rural schools in South Africa

Abstract

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many ICT initiatives were implemented in rural schools across the country to improve teaching and learning. This paper discusses the various factors that contributed to the failure to sustain ICT initiatives. Due to the risk of infection associated with face-to-face contact during the COVID-19 Pandemic, eLearning proved to be the sole means of ensuring educational continuity. The objective of this paper is to highlight factors affecting sustainability and provide recommendations that can assist in ensuring sustainable ICT initiatives in rural schools after the COVID-19 pandemic. This is accomplished by conducting a scoping review to investigate the sustainability of ICT infrastructure to enable eLearning. The following academic databases are used for scoping literature reviews: ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, and search engines such as Google. A total of 41 papers out of 800 publications were deemed appropriate for the analysis. The findings show that physical, management, social, and educational conditions all have an impact on the sustainability of ICT initiatives; thus, addressing these components can ensure sustainability.