UEW to Hold Virtual Congregation in August for Final Year Students
The Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Andy Ofori-Birikorang has given a hint on Management’s decision to hold a virtual congregation for final year students, who have met the requirement for graduation, in August, 2020.
He disclosed that Management was earnestly putting the necessary arrangements in place to graduate the final year students who utilised the Learning Management System (LMS) to complete their semester and to do their project work.
The Pro-Vice-Chancellor affirmed this on Monday, 13th July, 2020 at the Council Chamber, North Campus, Winneba when the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) LMS Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (ULMEC) had an encounter with the press to brief them on the hassle-free end of semester examination on the LMS.
“We are pleased with our performance. We are also pleased with the principles that we began with and these principles have successfully helped us to bring the semester to a logical conclusion. We have not even ended, all our final year students have utilised the system to submit their end of semester papers and their project works and we are on course to graduating them in August.”
“By the end of August, hopefully, every final year student who has met the requirements for graduation will be graduated; and the graduation is also going to be virtual. We are planning it,” he stated.”
Prof. Ofori-Birikorang pointed out that 65,000 regular students had registered on the Moodle by the end of the semester. According to him, however, out of the 65,000 students, 57,000 representing 88% of participants wrote the exams and also took part in all quizzes.
“Even though we had that 12% deficit, those students have not been left out. Last week, we rolled out supplementary exams for them, we are yet to take the statistics but many of them have been able to write the supplementary quizzes. From this week through to next week, we are running supplementary examinations for all those who couldn’t write the exams to have the opportunity to. We are giving these two chances, the exams and the supplementary. Those, who for any justifiable reasons are unable to write exams for the supplementary, they will be given the opportunity when we reopen,” he said.
The Pro-Vice-Chancellor declared that UEW was one of the first universities to have gone through the system successfully in a hustle-free manner for which every student would attest to that fact.
“Last week Friday we had a webinar in which our student leaders participated; and now, when we started, people were saying that the LMS is a hoax, now they are praising it. The final year students even didn’t want to come back to campus because the LMS was working efficiently.
“So, because of the successes, because of the new normal, University Management has decided that going forward, the learning management system is going to be part of our teaching and learning activities. And so beginning with the sandwich, all sandwich teaching and learning activities will also be online because we are still in the pandemic mood. We are hoping that when we start the 2020/2021 academic year, 30% of all teaching and learning activities in the regular form will be online and 70% will be face-to-face provided the pandemic is over,” he stated.
Prof. Ofori-Birikorang again indicated that the University would be using the LMS to conduct entrance exams for about 14,000 mature applicants. “UEW took the challenge, we showed that we have the resilience and the courage; we worked within our meager resources, we upscaled our servers and system even though we need more but within the limited resources, we have been able to bring the semester to a logical conclusion.”
He expressed Management’s appreciation to students and lecturers for the massive support provided to bring the semester to a logical conclusion.
