Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande will on Thursday visit the Umgungundlovu TVET college in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands to inspect its state of readiness for reopening.
This follows Nzimande’s announcement last month that campus activities will resume in a phased-in approach in line with alert Level 3 lockdown regulations.
The visit is also expected to shed light on innovative technology that will allow students to use a cellphone application to check their temperature before entering campus.
The invention of the screening and testing tool is a joint venture with Higher Health and can be downloaded from cellphones and via Whatsapp.
Nzimande says, “With high health checks, you can check yourself every day in the morning or anytime and press a button and that information will go to the database of the department of health… All students and staff, about 2 million of them, will be required to use it every day to access their own risk of health prior to entering campuses.”
Meanwhile, Nzimande recently visited the Tshwane University of Technology’s Ga-rankuwa Campus to inspect the institution’s readiness to resume lectures. He says he’s satisfied with the progress made so far.
“The impression about TUT’s readiness is that they have reprioritized their funding to cover COVID-19 related matters and they have repurposed one of their engineering laboratories to produce sanitizers and disinfectants for the whole university and also supply surrounding mainly poor communities. This is indeed very impressive, TUT has also developed a plan for multi-model remote learning,” says Nzimande.
