The Institute for Distance and e-Learning (IDeL) of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) has stated that face-to-face teaching will soon reduce drastically to pave way for an effective online teaching of students.
According to the Director of the Institute, Professor Francis Owusu-Mensah, online teaching has become an integral component of the institute and would be 70 per cent even for regular programs and 30 per cent for special one-on-one academic purposes.
In view of this, he said, the university management had put in place plans to financially support and supervise tutors who had been taken through intensive online teaching training to also train their colleagues at the various study centres of the institute.
Professor Owusu- Mensah was addressing the ceremony for opening a month-long intensive online teaching training for the first batch of 60 tutors of the institute here on Tuesday.
The first batch formed part of 240 tutors selected to become master trainers to enable them train the others, as according to the Director, “online teachings have become the order of the day”.
Among the topics were ‘Teaching online’, ‘Multimedia (ICT, tool box, video, images), ‘Teaching with modules’, ‘Assessment tools with modules’, and ‘Managing courses with modules’.
The training was aimed at building the capacity of the tutors of the study centres to offer quality online teaching to students.
Prof. Owusu-Mensah realised that not all the tutors were very skilful in online
teaching, hence the training since “distance learning is now effective in promoting education”.
He recalled that prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, which had resulted in many institutions resorting to online services, “UEW and the IDeL had already been in the leadership role so far as the promotion of online teaching is concerned”.
The director explained that as part of the training, a special orientation course would be organised for the master trainers to train fresh students to be able to access courses online.
In view of the 70 per cent online project of the institute, Prof. Owusu-Mensah observed that infrastructural expansion for classroom work would not be very necessary; rather such expansion would be Information Communication and Technology (ICT) based.
Every teacher of the institute, he said, should be able to do online teaching effectively and as such urged all of the selected tutors to be serious with the training to ensure the university maintained its lead in terms of online teaching in the country.
FROM KINGSLEY E.HOPE,KUMASI
