18 Midwifery IT tutors attend workshop
A six-member Intel Education Service Corp (IESC) team is in Ghana to support a week-long capacity building workshop for 18 Information Technology (IT) tutors of midwifery and community health training institutions across the country.
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The IESC is an innovative skills-based volunteer programme that harnesses the passion of Intel employees to work with organisations in developing countries that patronise Intel technology.
IESC teams provide technical assistance on the installation and maintenance of such technologies, as well as train end-users on the effective usage.
Push the boundaries
The current visit is part of Intel’s mission to “push the boundaries of smart and connected technology to make amazing experiences possible for every person on earth”.
The workshop is supported by Maternal Child Survival Programme (MCSP), USAID’s global cooperative agreement to introduce and support high-impact health interventions with the ultimate goal of ending preventable child and maternal deaths within a generation.
In Ghana, MCSP works in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MoH), to provide technical support and training for IT tutors in midwifery and community health training schools implementing eLearning programme.
The Intel team, made up of experts in health and safety, hardware and software experts, data analysts and system administrators, is supporting the tutors to better manage computer maintenance, network expansion issues, management and the setting up a helpdesk support structure and the SkooolHE application in readiness to scale up the implementation of the eLearning modules to the health training schools throughout the country.
The team had earlier visited midwifery institutions in Accra, Pantang, Koforidua and Ho to assist IT tutors with a number of IT issues and monitor the performance of the SkooolHE application.
The eLearning programme implemented through the SkooolHE application aims at providing a solution to challenges of infrastructure, tutors and learning materials in the face of increasing figures of enrolment in health training institutions, especially midwifery schools. An average of 12,524 students graduate annually from about 138 programmes that are offered in health training instructions in Ghana.
Chocked clinical sites
Addressing the workshop, a representative of the MoH, Mr. Evans Danso, says the Ministry’s “clinical sites are choked and supervisors are overwhelmed with the numbers that have been admitted for training, and we think the solutions to this is to use eLearning and the mLearning programmes to supplement teaching and learning.”
Mr Danso said the Ministry, with the support of other development partners, was planning to introduce other innovative ways of teaching and learning, such as electronic libraries and teleconferencing lectures, to resolve challenges of infrastructure and student populations in health training institutions across the country.
ELearning and teleconferencing ideas would be useful to overcome the problem of limited facilities in the northern part of the country for certain lessons, such as psychiatry, and having to transport them to the south to attend these lessons.
Participants interviewed were impressed about the eLearning programme, describing it as a useful supplementary tool for teaching. They described their interaction with the Intel team as insightful and innovative on the part of MCSP. Adolph Amartey of the Korle Bu midwifery training school said, “in all it’s been beneficial because it’s a new platform we are putting our students on and it’s an important investment and we have to make sure it works”.
