Collaborative online learning offers opportunities for knowledge sharing, peer support and participation in open, distance and e-learning (ODeL) environments. However, digital inequality often limits students’ access to technologies, connectivity and institutional support, requiring them to draw on both formal and informal learning networks. This article explores how collaborative learning contributes to the development of social capital among students studying at a South African ODeL institution. The study draws on a qualitative case study involving 22 students in an online module, using four focus groups and 12 individual interviews. An integrated conceptual framework comprising social capital theory, connectivism and heutagogy was used to examine how students navigate collaborative learning in contexts of digital inequality. The findings indicate that students developed both bonding and bridging social capital through participation in formal and informal learning networks. Bonding social capital emerged through trusted peer relationships that provided emotional and academic support, while bridging social capital expanded access to diverse perspectives and learning opportunities. Students synchronised institutional learning management systems with informal learning spaces and networks, including WhatsApp and face-to-face study groups, to overcome digital inequality and sustain collaborative learning. Collaborative networks also presented challenges, including unequal participation and exclusion. Contribution: By integrating social capital theory, connectivism and heutagogy, the study provides a richer explanation of how relationships, distributed learning networks, and learner autonomy support participation and inclusion. The findings highlight the value of recognising formal and informal learning networks as complementary learning spaces when designing more inclusive and contextually responsive ODeL environments.
South African higher education continues to grapple with coloniality as a structuring force that shapes how knowledge becomes legitimate and how curriculum transformation is imagined. While decolonisation has received sustained attention in public universities, private higher education remains less theorised within South African transformation scholarship. This conceptual article addresses that gap by developing a critical realist–decolonial framework for reading private higher education as a site where marketisation and coloniality operate through deeper generative mechanisms. The article draws on published scholarship and policy literature, using theoretical synthesis rather than empirical fieldwork. Critical realism offers an analytical lens to examine how visible institutional practices are generated by less visible causal structures. Its stratified ontology helps explain how curriculum discourse and quality assurance may reproduce epistemic dependency through legitimacy-seeking practices. Dialectical critical realism further sharpens attention to absence and contradiction, especially where African epistemologies and multilingual pedagogies remain weakly institutionalised. Contribution: The article makes six contributions. It brings private higher education into the South African decolonial debate. It shows how coloniality and marketisation quietly shape the legitimacy of the curriculum. It shows how critical realism can deepen decolonial analysis without reducing transformation to policy compliance. It offers a conceptual language for reading absence as a site of unrealised epistemic possibility. It proposes a critical realist–decolonial praxis that connects curriculum transformation to the institutional conditions that enable epistemic justice. It also creates a pathway for future empirical work to assess the framework’s usefulness across postcolonial higher education contexts.
Curriculum co-creation has emerged as a transformative response to Eurocentric dominance in South African higher education, yet its role in Africanisation within Universities of Technology remains empirically underexplored. This qualitative, critical-paradigm study examined staff and student insights at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) on co-creation as a pathway to Africanisation and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4 and 10. Data were collected from three focus groups that included 10 staff, 8 undergraduate students, and were analysed thematically using Freire’s critical-conscientisation framework. Findings revealed four themes: curriculum disconnect and epistemic alienation; institutional bureaucracy and academic resistance; the centrality of student voice and agency; and language as a contested terrain. Community engagement also emerged as vital to co-creation and the documentation of indigenous knowledge. Co-creation provides a meaningful pathway to Africanisation when treated as a decolonial imperative rather than a pedagogical option. Institutionalising co-creation, integrating African knowledge systems, adopting multilingual pedagogies, and allocating adequate resources are essential to advance a socially responsive curriculum focused on quality education and reduced inequalities. Contribution: This study bridges the gap between curriculum co-creation and Africanisation within the unique context of a South African University of Technology. By centring the situated voices of staff and students at DUT, it reframes co-creation as a decolonial tool. The research argues that redistributing epistemic power is essential to dismantling Eurocentric academic structures and validating African ways of knowing.
Teaching Career Psychology in South Africa faces the dual challenge of preparing students for employability while advancing social transformation and epistemic justice. This article develops an Integrated Experiential Pedagogical Framework that addresses this dual mandate. Drawing on reflections from honours students engaged in a community-based service-learning module, this study integrates insights from seven complementary theoretical lenses: Career Construction Theory, Social Cognitive Career Theory, Experiential Learning Theory, the Capability Approach, Decolonial Theory, Ubuntu Pedagogy and the Digital-Age Career Ecology perspective. Through a conceptual synthesis approach, this article demonstrates how these perspectives collectively reimagine employability as a lived, relational and context-aware journey, one that evolves through experience, reflection and meaningful engagement with community realities. Contribution: In doing so, the framework advances higher education transformation and epistemic justice by linking employability with decolonial pedagogy and contextual relevance, showing that students who learn through lived community experiences develop not only professional adaptability but also a socially responsive and transformative sense of purpose.
This conceptual article contends that generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) is driving an epistemic reconfiguration in higher education. It places AI within the processes of platformisation through which digital infrastructures reorganise how knowledge is produced, accessed and governed. These changes modify the conditions under which knowledge is recognised and learned, potentially weakening the educational relationship between writing, thinking and understanding when AI use bypasses the cognitive and metacognitive work through which understanding develops. The article develops a framework linking platformisation, AI-mediated meaning-making, and the reorganisation of pedagogy. It argues that these processes produce epistemic stratification by unevenly shaping students’ and institutions’ capacity to sustain epistemic ascent. Artificial intelligence is therefore not merely a technological or assessment challenge, but part of a broader epistemic reconfiguration that reshapes the conditions under which knowledge is produced, recognised and learned. Contribution: Situated in Global South contexts, the article examines how these dynamics intersect with historically entrenched inequalities and forms of epistemic dependency. In response, it advances epistemic ascent, understood as the structured development of conceptual understanding, disciplinary reasoning and judgement, as a central educational objective. The article argues that pedagogical judgement and design-based pedagogies are essential for organising AI use in ways that sustain conceptual engagement, epistemic justice and the university’s public-good mission. The article also illustrates two design-based pedagogical tasks through which lecturers can organise AI-supported learning around conceptual reasoning and disciplinary judgement.
