As South Africa continues to be affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, universities are working around the clock to ensure that students are supported through virtual study and staff are able to work remotely from home.
Since the announcement of lockdown regulations by the President on 23 March 2020, the Information Technology (IT) Division at Stellenbosch University (SU) has ensured business continuity by providing information and communications technology (ICT) based services and applications to staff and students over the last few weeks.
According to Attie Juyn, Senior Director: ICT, the restriction of movement and staying at home have effectively “terminated 99% of all traditional work or study activities on campus", which is now done online, from home.
“Our goal is to enable all ICT-based services and applications to staff and students working from home, with the same richness and quality that existed before," says Juyn.
Student IT support
Some of the key ICT support services during the lockdown period is the implementation of an efficient online learning platform through SUNLearn for students and teaching staff.
SUNLearn, through integration with the student information systems, includes all registered academic modules. This allows lecturers to have access to all students online, and supports an ongoing effort to assist students in having access to their lecturers even when they are not physically able to attend classes or tutorials.
Students are encouraged to use the service desk https://learnhelp.sun.ac.za for additional queries about the online learning platform.
Staff IT support
IT has also helped SU staff work from home, through various tools that the department has put in place.
Some of the tools for staff is a virtual private network (VPN), which allows access to the entire University network from any internet-connected location and Microsoft Teams (MS Teams), a versatile collaboration hub for teamwork.
Also, Skype for business, where users can create teams to collaborate and work together via Skype for business, a unified communication platform that includes instant messaging, presence (with the status option, be able to check availability of colleagues), file transfer and video conferencing.
For more detailed information and support for staff working from home, the IT department has come up with a comprehensive work remotely toolkit.
For news and more information from the IT department, visit http://blogs.sun.ac.za/it/en/.
