Challenges Experienced in the First Year of Implementation of a Teaching and Learning Virtual Partnership at the University of Namibia

Advances in information and communication technologies are enabling higher education institutions to build virtual partnerships with other institutions. Virtual partnerships are defined here as collaborations between geographically dispersed institutions, where interaction between these institutions is enabled mainly by electronic modes of communication. This article reports on the participants’ experiences of the implementation of one such partnership from the perspective of a partner in a developing context. It uses the SANTED Virtual Classroom Project (VCP), a virtual partnership initiative between the Departments of Computer Science at the University of Namibia (UNAM) and Rhodes University (RU), as a case study. In the VCP, the department at RU was tasked with building teaching and human resource capacity in the department at UNAM. The article focuses on the challenges experienced at UNAM during the first year of implementation of the VCP and lessons learned.