The evolution and growth of e-commerce has had a major impact in the daily living for the past few years [28]. It has brought and introduced new ways of trading and doing business. It enabled customers to negotiate business deals with companies and come into agreement about the services and goods to be purchased; and even come to the finalization and conclusion of the deals without ever being in the same place or meeting during all those negotiations. The e-commerce systems target the desktop or personal computers (PC s) as the hardware platform for clients. With all such good features and benefits e-commerce has, there is, to mention the least, one limitation that it has and that is mobility . People would still want to engage themselves in business deals whilst mobile. Mobile commerce or m-commerce appears into the scene to complete the journey started by e-commerce, thus it is seen as an extension of e-commerce [21]. Many services have migrated from the traditional e-commerce to m-commerce and that has allowed customers and clients to have access to their services whilst mobile or in motion. The lack of mobility in students services is being seen as a hassle and a problem by some students as they are forced to be fixed in one point at a time in order to get their services. The dissertation aims at addressing the service-related problems students encounter due to the lack of mobility in the University campus. It intends to develop a prototype called Open Mobile Student Portal that would demonstrate how some of the student services could be rendered in the mobile environment. The students could be able to get their balance or fees statements via their cell phones instead of having to go to the finance department in order to get their balance statement. Also, some library services could be rendered in the mobile environment so as to enable students to search for books in the library databases and book such books using their cell phones. / Professor Sebastiaan von Solms

The purpose of this study was to compare postsecondary institutions in North Carolina including state universities, private colleges and universities, and community colleges in regard to the number of students with disabilities, assistive technology availability, funding ratios for assistive technology, frequency of professional development training, legislative understanding, and other support factors for students with disabilities. This comparison was accomplished through quantitative and case summarization and analysis research methodologies. Data were collected through case summarizations and the administration of surveys sent to 110 coordinators of students with disabilities services at the 15 state universities, 37 private colleges and universities, and 58 community colleges within North Carolina. The response rate was 65.5% (N =72). Findings suggest there were no significant differences among coordinators' perceptions of legislative issues, student responsibility, institutional responsibility, consideration of context in which accommodations are used, and the impact of accommodations on other faculty and students and the institution. However, there were significant differences between the three types of institutions regarding assistive technology, funding for assistive technology, and services available to students who have disabilities. The findings also included that students who self-report disabilities attend private colleges and universities at a greater percentage than attend state universities or community colleges in North Carolina.

Public programming initiatives are considered an integral part of archival operations across the world because they support a greater use of archival records. In South Africa, public archival institutions are mandated in terms of section 5(1)(c) of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act (Act No. 43 of 1996) (NARSSA Act), to reach out to the less privileged sectors of society, by making known information concerning records by means such as publications, exhibitions and lending of records. This also includes taking archives to young people, especially school learners. As a result, public archives repositories in South Africa have designed programmes to take archives to school learners for the purpose of creating future users and expanding the use of archival sources. Despite efforts to take archives to the people in South Africa, it would seem that public programming methods that repositories use at schools are not effective in creating awareness and promoting public archives to attract school learners. This qualitative study utilised semi-structured interviews and observation as data collection tools to investigate schools as conduits for taking public archives to learners in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The study targeted learners and teachers in schools which participated in the archival public programming in Gauteng province, as well as staff members of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA) and Gauteng Provincial Archives responsible for public programming. The key findings suggest that the public archives repositories in Gauteng do not use technology, particularly social media, to market their services to school learners. The main method of taking archives to learners is through invitations and participation in the annual archives week, which do not yield any positive results, as learners do not visit the archives afterwards. It is recommended that NARSSA and Gauteng Provincial Archives consider using school learners who participated in archives week and are interested in archives to be ambassadors to further recommend the use of archives to potential users and their peers. Furthermore, collaboration between archivists and teachers from neighbouring schools should be considered by including school projects that involve the use of “archives’’. The study concludes that failure to adopt social media platforms to market archives would result in school learners not using archives. A further study covering all provinces in South Africa is recommended. / Information Science / M. inf. (Archival Science)