So, as a dad, it only makes sense for me to determine to what extent this will impact the future of my children and how I can prepare them for it. With this in mind, I decided to spend about an hour to find out what is on offer at the major South African universities in terms of studies in online marketing, internet marketing or whichever terminology they may be using to describe studies aimed at making an individual competent for a career or business in "new media" (as old as it already is). Let me start out by saying that university websites are very complicated and though I spend hours every day online, I really had a hard time to get to where I wanted to be on every one of the sites I visited. Most "faculties/ schools" have websites separate from the main university website, taking me all over the place to sites with different branding and navigation.
In the majority of the cases, links took me to 25 to 40-page PDF documents I had to read to find what I was looking for. I visited the websites of the universities of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Wits, Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Free State, Northwest, Nelson Mandela Metro, UNISA, Rhodes and KZN. My search for degrees ("undergraduate programmes") with a focal area on online marketing/internet marketing was disappointing. There may be certificate programmes, but my thinking was this: if the "online world" is so huge and showing such promise, surely it justifies more than short courses.
Having scanned the websites of each of the above-mentioned universities, downloading and reading detailed course programmes, this is the grand total of what I found:
Yes, that's it! I could not find any single mention of the words "internet", "online", "emarketing" or any similar phrase within the programme details of the business-, economics- or management courses at any of the other universities.
I have no doubt that I will be corrected by some of the universities telling me that I was either not looking in the right place or that they do offer such courses, but that it is simply not mentioned. In both cases my answer will be the same: you have just proven my point: You don't deem it serious enough to either mention it or make it easy for me to find.
If we hope to prepare South Africans for the future economy, I think that the major educational institutions need to wake up!
