Transparency & Accountability is urgently needed at UNISA.

Fellow students,

We cannot let the situation that has been brewing since the closing of Unisa’s call centre continue like this. We are UNISA's clients yet to them we just numbers. Speaking as someone who has been with Unisa for 3 years now I’m enough of this appalling unprofessional service they providing us with.

As a distance learning institution Unisa should be perfect when it comes to communication with its students. But as we all know this is the opposite. When it comes to Unisa one needs to go to a regional office all the time when they actually need some administration issue to be sorted out. Which does not make sense in this information age, especially for an ODL which has been in existence since 1873. A student is unable to get a response from Unisa through emails and contact numbers that ring unanswered, emails and numbers which by the way are provided to us by Unisa. No acknowledgments for any communication(lecturers excluded). Unisa does not even have a turnaround time, they claim its 48hours but we all know that is not the truth.

Furthermore Myunisa is constantly down, which is supposedly supposed to be our " student village". Thank goodness for small mercies like SWN without  , a lot of us would not have made it this far.

It is unacceptable that an institution with over 100 000 students does not have a customer/call centre, bearing in mind that it was available but got closed, which brings me to the question why?

Unisa needs to explain to us why they closed the  customer centre and they need to explain to us why we always have IT problems when its registration (payments taking as long as 2 weeks to reflect)  exam results, and delivery of study material. Surely if we have noticed that during these periods the system crashes/ there is a backlog, they too should have by now?

We were also introduced to a dean of students, who since then we have not seen nor heard from. So that avenue cannot be explored as well since she cannot be contacted. We also have an SRC that was elected for the sole purpose of dealing with student problems, but the only person we vividly see is Mpho Moralane. So where is everyone else? And how long can an SRC hold office at UNISA? We need change urgently this is unacceptable.

The main objective for this petition is to ask for a  call centre, where, one can call and actually get assistance, efficient prompt service because currently Unisa is very unprofessional and it looks like the situation deteriorates every year. We hope that Prof QM Temane, Prof P LenkaBula and the SRC will get this petition and answer our questions. We need transparency which is currently non-existent at our institution which we pay for, with our hard earned money.

Lastly, We'd  like to draw your attention to the below article which was published nationally, we cannot have such things being published about our beloved institution.

  www.timeslive.co.za/ilive/2016/01/22/Uni...-a-sunken-ship-iLIVE