UNESCO – CENDLOS organise Maiden OER Sensitisation Workshop
COVID-19 and its associated closure of schools affected an estimated 9.2 million students from KG to Senior High School, as well as half a million tertiary level students and teachers in public and private institutions.
Unfortunately, many of the teachers did not have relevant information on digital platforms for teaching and learning. This was further worsened by the fact that majority of teachers did not have the basic digital skills to facilitate teaching and learning remotely.
Under the UNESCO Korean Funds-In-Trust ICT Transforming Education in Africa project, UNESCO is supporting the Centre for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling (CENDLOS) to facilitate the development, collection and dissemination of free-to-use, quality-assured curriculum resources to be accessed by educators and learners through online platforms.
As part of the pre-implementation activities for the project, UNESCO in collaboration with CENDLOS held a two-day orientation workshop on the Open Education Resource (OER) repository platform from 1st March to 2nd March, 2022 at the Aknac hotel, East Legon in the Greater Accra Region. Participants were drawn from selected stakeholder groups including Ghana Institute of Journalism, Accra Technical University, Ghana Education Service, UNESCO, KNUST, UEW as well as the community of retired educationists.
The Executive Director of CENDLOS, Nana Gyamfi Adwabour in addressing the workshop, informed participants about the need to infuse technology in Education, especially in the era of Covid-19. He explained that OER educational materials come in the form of text, videos, images and presentations. “The materials are for the purposes teaching, learning, research and assessment and will be accessible and free for all. OER promotes easy circulation of teaching and learning resources and activities, and provides a platform for students to showcase their creativity”, he added.
Mr. Adwabour further stated that in order to build capacity for the adoption and mainstreaming of OER in Ghana, teachers will be trained in the usage of the platform in order to empower them to serve as coaches for their students. Contents on the platform will be relevant, of high quality and will be in a language that will be appropriate for all learners and end users. The platform will also be user friendly to both teachers and learners.
Speaking at the 2-day event, the representative of UNESCO, Mr. Eric Balangtaa, said that the aim of the workshop was to sensitize stakeholders about Open Educational Resources as an opportunity to complement national initiatives for quality teaching and learning delivery in Ghana. He added that there would be ongoing engagements with all relevant stakeholders to onboard their inputs and ensure optimum utilization of the OER platform once deployed.
Participants at the workshop expressed a very high level of interest in the OER and urged other stakeholders including telecommunications companies, NGOs, education advocacy groups and philanthropist to assist in various ways including policy formulation, provision of digital infrastructure and devices, capacity-building for facilitators, content development and publicity.
The Centre for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling (CENDLOS) is the state-mandated agency under the Ministry of Education responsible for mainstreaming the use of ICT-based systems to enhance the quality of teaching and learning delivery in Ghana. UNESCO is a leading development partners of CENDLOS. As a result of their strong institutional relationship, the two institutions have worked closely together to deliver key ICT-backboned educational interventions for Ghana.
