Lyle Liyabona – African Institute of Technology

How distance learning is reshaping post-matric education

Lyle Liyabona — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:14:57 +0000

News24 – 03 January 2026

As thousands of South African matric pupils await their results, families across the country are grappling with crucial decisions about hicher education that will shape the next chapter of their children’s lives.
The traditional university route isn’t the only option anymore. Distance learning has emerged as a viable alternative, with institutions like REGENT Business School leading the charge in flexible education delivery.
Building trust through experience
REGENT Business School, which has been operating in the distance learning space for over 25 years, has seen growing demand from families seeking alternatives to conventional university study. The institution has positioned itself as one of South Africa’s most established private higher education providers, offering accredited and affordable distance learning programmers that combine academic rigor with flexibility.
For families navigating post-matric decisions for the first time, this balance of structure and adaptability has become increasingly appealing. The school offers dedicated guidance for matriculants registering at REGENT Business School, helping families understand placement, requirements, and progression options. Flexible study model gaining traction

The school’s supported distance learning approach allows students to transition for
guidance. and access to learning centers across: Southern Africa

This hybrid model supports independence whilst maintaining the +hat
families value helping students develop confidence and discipline for tertiary stud:

What’s driving the shift?

Families choosing post-matric stud look for flexibility. credibility. and clear progression
REGENT stands out through

Flexible learning _ online study with access to learning centers to suit individual needs

Accessible entry pathways – Higher Certificates that lead into Diplomas and Degrees
REGENT has programmers across the Higher Education NOF, which enable a student to
further their studies with the same institution.

Innovation-led learning -tech-rich environments like iLeadLAB’s (Academic
Makerspaces) that support applied learning

Accredited, recognized qualifications – aliened to industry needs and global standards

Fair placement – endorsement-based entry that guide: students into the right
qualification, not exclusion by points

Multiple pathways available
The institution’s structured progression model ensures students are placed according to what they quality for, rather than excluded by rigid systems
For many school leavers Higher Certificate provides possible entry point into higher education while establishing a foundation for future progression.
Students who meet the criteria can advance into Diploma qualifications,. or move directly into Bachelor’s degree programmers aligned to business, management and professional career paths. Focus on employ-ability

Beyond traditional qualifications, these programmers emphasize practical skills like thinking, digital competence and business understanding – areas increasingly valued b: employers in South Africa’s competitive job market. As matric results shape decisions that will influence years to come distance learning continues to emerge as a trusted and future-read: choice within South Africa’s high education space.

We can improve Stem marks, simply by showing up

Lyle Liyabona — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:31:17 +0000

Daily Maverick – 27 January 2026

This month, more South Africans than ever celebrated the news that their children passed matric, with the country’s highest pass rate in history (88%). But if you look a little closer, the details tell a much more complex story.

Our marks are not improving, which may seem discordant when we see more and more top African scientists shining on the global stage.

South Africa’s 2025 maths pass rate fell from 69% to 64%, and physics plateaued around 77%, only rising by 1%.

Minister of Basic Education Siviwe Gwarube also noted that in 2025, only 42% of kids aged four to five were developmentally on track with early numeracy. The latest global TIMSS data also shows a significant drop in our primary school maths marks – worse than half of all countries surveyed.

This poor performance doesn’t just affect individual young people’s lives. It hampers innovation and has a significant impact on the economy. It indicates that we haven’t come far enough since apartheid’s discriminatory maths exclusion laws. And it impacts on SA’s ability to “meet the challenges of the future, like AI, climate change, energy and sustainable development”, in the words of Vijay Reddy, author of the South African Public Relationship with Science Survey, undertaken by the Human Sciences Research Council.

So, this International Day of Education, you’d be forgiven for wanting to jump right in to try to solve the blatant issues with South Africa’s education system – especially if you’re a scientist.

Scientists solve problems. That’s their thing.

But the solution is not only about improving resources and funding to schools (although this would certainly help). A far more pragmatic approach may be to inspire and foster the talent that already exists in our classrooms.

And that’s something that scientists and innovators can start doing, today.

Excellence is everywhere

Some of South Africa’s maths and science learners are excelling globally and raising the profile of African knowledge, despite a widespread lack of basic schooling resources across the nation. A familiar tale amid the devastating inequality experienced in our country.

In December, four young scientists won top honours at the World Innovative Science Project Olympiad (WISPO) in Bali, earning prestigious Grand Awards for their innovative projects.

In more established cohorts, UCT Professor Lynne Shannon was awarded the 2025 Prince Albert Grand Medal for Ocean Science, the first researcher in the entire Global South to win the distinguished accolade.

We are not lacking in talent. We just need to help foster it.

If talent is not bolstered by exposure and belief at all levels of schooling, there is little chance of inherent aptitude being brought to its full potential, even with ideal resources in place … kind of like a loaf of bread being left to rise in a dank, dark environment where it simply cannot expand, no matter how perfect its ingredients.

Scientists can play a huge role in inspiring and proving to students that it is for them, and that they’re capable of overcoming the challenges they will encounter along the way. This can happen simply by showing up and putting out exciting science where young people can engage with it, in their own language, and on their own terms.

Three ways for scientists to make a difference

My research is focused on the role of scientists in schools, not primarily as educators, but as role models. What I’ve found is that simply by facilitating conversations with young people about science as a tool for creating alternative futures, we can tangibly change education outcomes. Here are some ideas to help scientists do this:

1. Diverse visibility

Research by Marina Joubert from the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (Crest) in 2017 found that while “only 8% of South Africans are white, 78% of the group of ‘visible’ scientists were white, and 63% of the visible scientists were men. Only 17 black women were identified as publicly visible scientists.”

In any career, you cannot be what you cannot see. Early visibility of scientists of every race, gender and class is vital to help young people to see themselves in the field, and not just the image of a wealthy, white, lab-coated male. This will go a long way to developing the next generation of African investigators and problem solvers.

2. Presence

Unfortunately, seeing scientists at all is often more of a hurdle. So, scientists should take every opportunity to place themselves in the media, especially into spaces in which young people can engage.For many young people in under-resourced schools or regions, exposure to any working scientists or their stories is rare.

Many children have little or no knowledge of how their unique talents and passions could lead them into highly fulfilling careers and the opportunity to contribute meaningfully and valuably to the sector, and to society at large. Each of us can think back to a childhood encounter that inspired us or motivated us in a particular direction.

The presence of scientists and their stories in the lives of young people is a practical, proven, high-level way that we can contribute to South Africa’s long-term improvement in education.

3. Storytelling

Science is, contrary to popular belief, not all about numbers and chemical symbols. It’s about stories: of how people have solved the world’s biggest problems or changed their own lives through innovation, and ancient or alternative ways of thinking. When you frame concepts like this – real people doing amazing things – it’s suddenly much more compelling or easy to engage with new ideas as a young person.

Our national Science Spaza programme has been a great example for me of the efficacy of this “visibility, presence, storytelling” thinking in action.

Through Science Spaza, we distribute real stories of African scientists and innovators in engaging formats (such as comics, videos or interactive worksheets) to curious young minds aged 12-18. We’ve seen time and time again how this human, story-based, fun approach makes science more relevant, relatable and exciting.

Over the past 11 years, learners across our 120+ science clubs have seen their marks improve, career pathways open up and general passion for increase – simply by seeing scientists like them reflected back to them, and learning about the powerful ways that science and maths are being used in the world to transform lives for the better.

One high school student, Goratileone Oepeng, began a science club and registered it with Science Spaza to receive newspapers and activity worksheets. Years later, he won the FameLab heat at the University of Pretoria, where he was a master’s student in entomology. I recently bumped into him at the Oppenheimer Research Conference, where he was giving a young researcher spotlight talk, a champion for bees and biodiversity.

Make a difference

By getting scientists and their stories into schools, we’re not just filling a resource gap; we’re also showing kids that science is theirs for the taking. It’s about identity, not just ideas.

If you’re a scientist, you have the power to make a difference – it’s just not where you might expect it.

Sure, we need funding and teachers and classrooms. But my research has shown that so often, we make the mistake of thinking we can jump in and solve systemic issues all at once, without focusing on tangible ways to foster the talent that already exists in schools, and ensure it reaches the global stage. We need scientists to inspire young people to follow in their footsteps, which will, in turn, encourage them to dedicate themselves to learning.

No matter what field your research is in, there are probably more ways you could be sharing your work with local schools or supporting the next generation to become involved – by showing up in person, embracing the media to tell your stories of science, or by contributing to resources that students can engage with to learn not just about your research, but about YOU.

Maybe you look like them.

Maybe you’ve had an inspiring journey to get to where you are.

Or maybe you’re simply the first scientist they’ve ever seen.

Whatever your story, it’s worth sharing.

Not just for you, or for students and their learning outcomes, but for South Africa’s future and African knowledge as a whole

Why SA’s tech talent pipeline is failing to deliver outcomes

Lyle Liyabona — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:27:11 +0000

Daily Maverick – 28 January 2026

“South Africa doesn’t have an ambition problem when it comes to tech talent, it has an outcomes problem.” That is how HyperionDev founding CEO Riaz Moola, the coding bootcamp specialist you probably heard about in a year-end marketing campaign that ran across Primedia radio stations, opened a conversation about the AI skills crisis in Mzansi.

He then went on to frame the company operations as a “finishing school” for Computer Science graduates, because our tertiary institutions aren’t teaching work-ready skills.

To be fair to Moola, his suggestions that the likes of UCT, Wits and Stellenbosch University (that have been churning out world-class minds for decades) are obsolete, and that the fix is a privately run, venture-backed bootcamp, is at least accompanied by partnerships with the universities (Maties, currently).

A journey of reformation

HyperionDev (which is a subsidiary of CoGrammar) hasn’t always helped its own case. Search the dev boards on Reddit and the company’s history reveals a trail of operational controversies, most notably some conflict with the UK Department for Education regarding funding claims, and persistent user reviews describing earlier iterations of its courseware as a “dropbox full of PDFs” rather than a high-tech learning experience.

The experiences seen on the internet fly in the face of the ed-tech saviour narrative. But as Moola unpacked the mechanics of the “finishing school” model, he sounded like a man who had learned some hard lessons.

“We live in a country that has the highest inequality in the world and yet you have a subject [Computer Science] that can unlock the highest earnings,” he said. “In South Africa, software developers, I think, earn the highest relative to living costs in the world, only behind America.”

Mind the multibillion-rand skills gap

Before we get to the solution, we have to look at the sheer scale of the problem. A sector analysis by Synesys suggests that the AI skills shortage alone could cost the South African economy up to R124-billion by 2027. Perplexingly, local youth unemployment sits at over 60%, but there are 45,000 unfilled positions in AI and data science right now.

The 2024 JCSE-IITPSA ICT Skills Survey backs this up, calling it a “chronic skills shortage” that is forcing local companies to outsource jobs to international markets; exporting capital when we should be importing wages.

Moola argues that this gap exists because universities and the industry are speaking different languages.

“The pathway to it is very convoluted and complex if you’re going to do a three-year or four-year computer science degree,” he says. “And it totally fails to teach the skills to actually get a job as a junior developer or data scientist.”

Toolmakers, not mere users

This is where the finishing school concept gains clicks. The argument is that universities teach the grammar of computing – the deep theoretical proofs and algorithms – but fail to teach the dialects spoken in modern offices, like deploying code via GitHub or setting up an AWS cloud instance.

Professor Hussein Suleman, Dean of Science at UCT, agreed with the premise, if not the conclusion. He has famously argued that “Computer Science is not programming” and that universities are there to produce “tool builders”, not just “tool users”.

The problem is, South African corporates are desperate for tool users. They need people who can ship code on day one, not just prove the mathematical efficiency of a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard.

Moola admits that early versions of HyperionDev got it wrong.

“We realised the courses were too hard,” he said, acknowledging that as a Cambridge and UKZN grad, he had overestimated the baseline. “We had to keep not making them easier per se, but more accessible.”

The pivot has been a move toward what he calls “human-led code review”. It’s an attempt to mimic the mentorship you’d get from a senior dev in a real agile team.

“Mentorship is not a ‘nice to have’ in technical education, it’s a performance lever.”

What this means for you

If you are a student or graduate:

The hard truth is that your degree is probably just the entry ticket, not the job guarantee. If your GitHub profile is empty, you are invisible to recruiters. Whether you pay for a bootcamp or grind through free resources, you need to prove you can build tools, not just pass exams. Treat your portfolio like your actual CV.

If you are a parent:

You might need to adjust your financial planning. The three-year degree model is fading. If your child is studying Computer Science, prepare for the possibility of a finishing school year.

If you are hiring talent:

Stop hunting for unicorns. That senior dev with five years of AI experience you are looking for is probably working for a US company earning dollars while sitting in Cape Town. If you want talent, you will have to manufacture it. The R124-billion cost to the economy is an aggregate of companies refusing to train the youth they have.

The business of bridging the gap

HyperionDev isn’t the only player trying to close this skills gap, and frankly, some of the competitors offer a model that makes a lot more sense for a cash-strapped South African student.

Take WeThinkCode, which operates on a tuition-free model sponsored by corporates, where entry is based purely on aptitude. Newly appointed CEO Ashmita Singh describes the company as “a critical bridge between talent and opportunity in an increasingly AI-driven economy.”

“Our focus is on shifting South Africa from being a consumer of technology to a creator of it by building strong coding and emerging AI capabilities that translate into real employment and economic mobility.”

Then there is Umuzi, which actually pays students a stipend to learn, treating the education process like a job simulation.

In contrast, HyperionDev is a premium product. Courses can cost anywhere from R25,000 to over R80,000. While they offer income-share agreements (where you pay back once you’re hired), the financial burden ultimately sits with the learner.

But by white labelling their bootcamps for partner universities, they have effectively become the outsourced vocational wing of the ivory tower Moola was throwing stones at. It gives the university a revenue stream and the student a certificate that doesn’t look like it came from a fly-by-night internet college.

No simple solutions

With WeThinkCode raking in grants and signing partnerships with Google and Meta in recent months, it seems like Big Tech is all in on developing those crucial missing skills in this gateway to Africa market.

But is outsourcing the silver bullet? Also no. The virtual emigration trend, where 40% of our local developers are working remotely for foreign companies, suggests that even if we fix the supply side, retaining that talent is a whole other economic battle.

What Moola and the government have correctly identified is that the university degree is no longer the finish line. Singh says that the company “signed a letter of intent with the Department of Higher Education and Training to further expand impact on a national level by bringing together public, private and civil bodies to create a necessary ecosystem”.

The underutilisation of potential ICT talent in South Africa has an estimated lifetime opportunity cost of R11.5-trillion. In a market losing billions of rand to a skills vacuum, we probably need to pay the premium for the polish