As part of celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of Ghana-China relationship, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi and Tsinghua University, China have held a discourse on the way forward after COVID 19’. The celebration which was held virtually was under the theme ’60 years of great friendship; building back stronger and better a shared Ghana-China future beyond COVID 19.
The Dean of International Programmes Office (IPO), Professor Rexford Assassie Oppong, KNUST in his keynote address revealed that KNUST values the relationship the University has had with China over the years and has, therefore, established Chinese language as a minor course in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences with 98 students as Chinese language learners.
Professor Assassie-Oppong thanked the Chinese Ambassador for offering a $100-dollar cash prize on two consecutive occasions to 15 students studying the language. He further implored the Tsinghua University to send Chinese language lecturers to KNUST to help assist the teaching of the Language.
The Head of Department, Human Resource and Organizational Development, Dr. Henry Kofi Mensah, in his presentation on Moving KNUST teaching and learning online; lessons learnt, said KNUST had a robust V-Class learning platforms for the Institute of Distance Learning, but adopted it for the use of the entire university due to COVID 19. He revealed that with the current students’ population of over 65,000, KNUST migrated the teaching and learning to a learning management system (LMS) powered by Moodle.
According to him, the KNUST Academic Space houses virtual classroom, online exams, video chats and conferencing, webroom conference, electronic information resources, Prempeh II Library, Library catalogue, Institutional repository and electronic information resources.
Dr. Mensah mentioned that so far, KNUST has trained 800 academic staff on psychology of online learning, preparing online study guides and uploading course resources and conducting live lectures, setting discussion forum, assignment and quizzes and quality metrics for online teaching.
Dr. Alexander Boakye Marful of the Department of Architecture took participants through innovative collaboration for sustainable development: The Future of Education corporations while Dr. John Amuasi, Department of Global and International Health also took participants through Ghana’s response to COVID-19, challenges and opportunities of the pandemic in all sectors of life.