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Maximise e-learning to increase admission — Prof. Dzidonu

The President of the Accra Institute of Technology (AiT), Professor Clement Dzidonu, has urged public universities in the country to make maximum use of technology to increase admission.

He stated that the use of electronic learning (e-learning), for example, would help remove the traditional barriers of time and distance to make education more accessible to the increasing student population.

“If we can invest in technological infrastructure, we can make a thing of the past the perennial limited admission challenges facing our public universities,” he stated.

Prof. Dzidonu was addressing the just-ended 65th New Year School at the University of Ghana on Wednesday.

The four-day annual event was held on the theme: ‘Information and Communication technology-driven education for sustainable human development: Challenges and prospects.”

ICT to boost admission

Prof. Dzidonu stated that the three major universities in the country had enormous potential to increase their capacity to admit more students than they were at present doing.

“If Legon is admitting 15,000 students on the average each year, it can make use of technology to admit 10 times more and also improve quality education.    

“Besides, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and University of Cape Coast also have the capacity to provide quality education to all the 25 million Ghanaians if they utilise ICT,” Prof. Dzidonu added.

E-learning is the future

Prof. Dzidonu stated that globally, campus-based universities were becoming less crucial for learners, thanks to the Internet that was reducing tuition fees and making available the best lecturers in the world to students - than a single university.

Prof Dzidonu stated that the emergence of technology had blurred the distinction between traditional campus-based university, and open learning university and as well made the need for classrooms for teaching and learning irrelevant.

“The use of e-learning offers more advantages beyond student-lecturer interaction and facilitates the complete circle of teaching and learning as technology broadens unlimited access to learning materials,” he stated.

“Since the teacher is not a repository of knowledge, we must utilise ICT to enhance teaching and learning,” he added.

ICT will enhance modern education

In his view, the importance of technology in supporting modern education was extremely important.

According to him, many businesses in Ghana were complaining of not being able to recruit students with the right knowledge and skills suitable for the job market. 

“As a nation, we are not training people for the modern economy but we can use technology to address this challenge.

“However, we can address this challenge if we learn to strategically use technology to equip our students with the right knowledge and skills for the modern economy,” Prof Dzidonu said.

Lack of funds crippling universities  

A research fellow at the KNUST, Dr Albert Amoah Saah, stated that the demand for tertiary education had been so high but the public universities had been slow to respond to such demand due to the lack of resources to address the challenge.

‘The lack of funds has been a major headache facing most universities, who presently have to use their internally generated funds from long distance education to embark on projects,’ he stated.

He added that the use of ICT to deliver e-learning would, therefore, empower most universities to increase access to quality education to students.

‘Today, long distance education is a big time business and it is time we embrace the concept to offer quality education to our students across the country,’ Dr Saah stated.

 

 

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