Pioneering Smart Campus Innovation in South Africa
UNISA, founded in 1873, is the largest open distance learning institution in South Africa. UNISA has over 400,000 students, including international students from more than 130 countries and regions worldwide, making it one of the world’s mega universities, and one of the few on the African continent.
UNISA is renowned for its versatile teaching approaches, providing online and distance courses and high-quality education. All of these make UNISA a globally-recognized pioneer in distance education.
Embracing Change: UNISA’s Digital Journey
UNISA offers a flexible open distance e-learning (ODeL) system, providing a learner-centered approach that lets students study across time zones and interact with teachers and peers through online platforms and face-to-face sessions.
For the past 150 years, the university has delivered high-quality, efficient tools for teaching and learning. However, as UNISA expands its faculty and builds new campuses, managing devices across its live network has become increasingly complex.
With a small O&M team and limited technical capacity, the university often relies on external services, which slows problem resolution and increases costs. In today’s era of widespread digital transformation, even this long-established institution faces significant challenges in modernizing its teaching methods.
Shaping the Future of Distance Learning with a Smart Campus
UNISA is embracing digital transformation to enhance research output, streamline course delivery, and provide a better learning experience. To achieve this, it deployed Huawei’s CloudCampus Solution across all campuses. Using switches, routers, wireless access points (APs), and a network management platform, the solution delivers high-speed, reliable, and secure connectivity, improving network services and user experience.
The upgrade provides a powerful, easy-to-manage network with 24/7 stable Internet access. Full Wi-Fi 6 coverage across more than 30 campuses offers high bandwidth, low latency, and support for many concurrent users, enabling teachers and students to access high-quality resources anytime, anywhere on UNISA’s ODeL platform.
For O&M, UNISA uses iMaster NCE-CampusInsight, a campus network analyzer that collects real-time telemetry data and applies big data analytics and machine learning to identify fault patterns, efficiently manage devices, reduce resource waste, and improve network performance.
Key benefits include:
- Full-coverage Wi-Fi 6: Over 2,500 APs across 30+ campuses provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity, supporting hybrid learning with online communities and remote classrooms.
- Cloud-network synergy: An intelligent, integrated network combines wired and wireless systems, offering high performance, massive data throughput, and future-proof scalability.
- Centralized, efficient, cost-effective O&M: A unified network management system enables centralized device management, boosting efficiency and cutting OPEX by approximately 80%, while reducing technical training costs.