The Significance of Monitoring and Evaluation in Curriculum Transformation

Introduction

The public service sector, businesses, non-governmental organisations, and international agencies in South Africa have witnessed an array of changes since the dawn of democracy in 1994. As expected, this has also been the case with the higher education sector. Institutions of higher learning have had to adapt their policies, operations, mandates, and review and realign their offerings. This includes the development of transformative strategies against the new demands of a democratic country (The Presidency, 2007; Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), 2016; DHET, 2019). One such major change in the South African higher education sector has been the amalgamation or merger of Historically disadvantaged Institutions (HDTIs) that admitted mostly students from the Black race, with the so-called ‘high performing’ and well-resourced universities that catered for the White population (Asmal, 2002; Hlatshwayo, 2020). According to Tilack (as cited in Mohuba & Govender, 2016), the post-1994 government adopted the merger model, hoping to improve on the operation and financial leverage of struggling HDTIs. With the dawn of the 21st century, the higher education sector also saw an increased demand for wider access, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency within the funding formulas or subsidies by government, as well as an increased demand for successful graduates. This has been influenced, to some extent, by increased neoliberalism in the market economies worldwide.

Neoliberalists believe that sustained economic growth is the only way to achieve human progress. Neoliberalism allows for minimal state intervention in the economic and social affairs of the people (Smith, 2019). Neoliberalism strives to normalise and extend the free-market logic by marketizing previously non-marketized practices and social relations, which have now become commodified (Saunders & Ramírez, 2017, p. 399). Because of growing neoliberalism, the higher education sector has also been commodified (Ball, 2012; Schwartzman, 2013; Chen, I-ru & Lo, 2013; Ingleby, 2015; Saunders & Ramírez, 2017) to a point where institutions of higher learning have adopted business models for managing and achieving profitability.

Commodification in the higher education sector occurs at administrative and instrumental levels (Yang, 2006; Plante, 2016). At an administrative level, the institution runs like a business, with cost effectiveness as its focus, while at the same time, maximising resources, product deliverables, and evaluation. At instrumental level, teaching and learning is cost-driven; that is, it focuses on the necessary steps for producing graduates. Commodification also considers knowledge as a commodity, and its exchange rate is measured crudely by juxtaposing the cost of acquiring a degree with future financial earnings (Schwartzman, 2013; Rotta & Teixeira, 2018). From this perspective, students are considered ‘consumers’ of education. Consequently, their educational needs must be prioritised.

The need for efficacy has sprouted the need for transparency, accountability, and sustainability (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2016) of institutions of higher learning. These various vicarious developments have, thus, given rise to the need for and emergence of monitoring and evaluation management and practices within the higher education sector. Growing preoccupation with M&E performance indicators in respect of accountability and transformation of states, extended to publicly funded institutions around the world, reached its peak in the developed countries during the 1980s (Lange & Luescher, 2003; Malatjie, 2017). In Africa, the rising popularity of M&E as a discipline became evident in the early 1990s (Basheka & Byamugisha, 2015).