**1. Introduction**

Poor economic performance and a lack of a focused national education policy in Zimbabwe have seen the country hopping from one policy to the next. This has been largely influenced by the country's unstable politics experienced under the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party since the arrival of independence in 1980. Inter alia, the abrupt revision of the foundations, principles, and issues of the curriculum of education and training became one of the prominent flagships of the ZANU-PF's maladministration. Recently, the education sector has slowly turned virtual, a development that further gives teachers a feeling that they are being forced to subsidise teaching and learning exercises. This is so because they must go out of their way, using their meagre earnings to buy state-of-the-art information and communication technology (ICT) equipment to use for the teaching and learning of students and pupils. Transforming to virtual learning environments (VLEs) is yet to yield meaningful results. However, the Second Republic's government's abandonment of Education 3.0 for Education 5.0,

which ignores all preliminary levels of education outside of tertiary and higher education, is enough to prove that in the modern world it is difficult to follow a fixed education guide forever. At the same time, the revolution has been hampered by the outbreak of COVID-19. The disease has brought new dimensions to the face-to-face forms of teaching and learning in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Zimbabwe. The outgrowths coincided with the adoption of Education 5.0, which is built around the following key components: teaching, research, community service, innovation, and industrialisation. This chapter discusses the relevance of Education 5.0 and VLEs. It also suggests the way forward post Education 5.0. The study adopted a qualitative research approach during fieldwork, utilising face-to-face interviews with five lecturers in the Department of Creative Art and Design (DCAD), Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT), Zimbabwe. Purposive sampling was used to pick the interviewees based on their knowledge and experience in HEI teaching and learning. The main discovery suggests that Education 5.0 is not new, particularly at CUT. Hence, the lecturers argued that HEIs are biting off more than they can chew as they have been struggling to meet the billing of the previous education model, Education 3.0, within which innovation and industrialisation were cherished, particularly at CUT. In short, the new Education 5.0 doctrine is neither more advanced than its predecessor nor sustainable given the lack of a straight policy framework that guides higher education and training in Zimbabwe. A similar post-Government of National Unity (GNU) policy, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), soon became a white elephant after the unprecedented November 2017 coup d'état. Though the policy was started from the grassroots, it excluded the arts, which made it rather problematic because it was not holistic. This scenario has been commonplace in most pre- and post-multiparty republic of 2009–2013 educational policy initiatives. Former minister Lazarus Dokora's curriculum review for primary and secondary education is another example of uncherished educational policies implemented almost at the same time as STEM in Zimbabwe. STEM has already been suspended by the new dispensation. One good reason for that has been the need to rubber stamp political muscle by the incumbent government from time to time. The developments explain what was happening during the late and former president Robert Gabriel Mugabe's regime; a fact that cannot be proved or disproved in black-and-white terms. Since achieving independence, Zimbabwe still lags behind the world order of the IoT. A handful of the interviewees were of the view that teaching and learning via VLEs was not different from the traditional face-to-face model. The majority claim that through the utilisation of VLEs, HEIs are simply flogging a dead horse since the cost implications that characterise Internet access in Zimbabwe are heinous. Only a few students attending higher education and training have surplus income to purchase digital equipment and access the Internet.
