University of Ghana not ‘sufficiently equipped’ for e-learning programme – Local UTAG President

President of the University of Ghana chapter of the University Teachers Association of Ghana, Dr. Samuel Nkumban, has stated that the University is not sufficiently equipped to roll out its e-learning en masse.

This comes after a two week trial phase of the programme.

Dr. Nkumban says that the University must learn lessons from the challenges and move to improve its online infrastructure, thereby, giving students and lecturers the needed resources for students and lecturers to effectively engaged in online academic activities.

NewsGhana24’s publication “8 Post COVID-19 Decisions Education Sector Cannot Run From  “seems to be happening already to many universities in Ghana including UG.

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“I am just of the view that our university, at this time, is not sufficiently ready, in terms of infrastructure and the needed capacity, to be able to effectively roll it out given the numbers of students we have. We can take advantage of the situation build our infrastructure,” he told UniversNews

Dr. Nkumban also sided with students on the challenge that the university’s Sakai Learning Management System was not stable enough for the conduct of examinations.

He acknowledged that the unreliability of the platform could see students graded as failing a course as the challenges with system may delay or prevent in submitting their exercises.

 

”Given the fact that you go online with students and then you realise yourself that for some reasons some of them are inactive, the implication is that if you were to give them a sit-in exam on Sakai it would not be fair to any student to fail exams because it is that system that fails and not necessarily the that the student didn’t know,” he said.

Late March, Management of the university announced it decision to continue academic activities for the remaining part of the semester online.

This move was necessitated by the closure of all Universities across the country in line with a directive from President Akufo-Addo to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country

However, against earlier assurances of a secured and reliable platform, students have reported that the Sakai Learning Management System (LMS) has been largely inaccessible, forcing them to forfeit some tests and this is due to the enormous number of students who log on to the Sakai LMS at a time.

 

Story by: Khadijah Abdul Latif | universnewsroom.com