KNUST now has an e-learning portal of Global quality, Thrillernewsgh.com can report arguably.
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology as part of measures to ensure that students proceed with their academic work online in this time of emergency has successfully made a significant improvement on its e-learning platform.
Originally used only by the Institute of Distant Learning, it’s been upgraded from one functioning feature to nine, with capacity for over 65,000 students.
Students can now access the e-learning platform, known as Virtual Academic Space for free.
At an Academic Board Meeting on May 4, 2020, there was a decision for end-of-semester assessment to be based on student average score of three to five written assignments per course.
It, therefore, became incumbent on the university management to make online learning easily accessible.
The virtual classroom feature now has, in addition, Online Exams, Video Chat and Conferencing as well as Webroom conference which reflects the requisites for a world-class e-learning platform.
Others are Electronic Information Resources, Prempeh the Second Library Catalogue Institutional Repository, and Turn It In.
Deputy Director at the Institute of Distance Learning, Dr Ahmed Agyapong in KNUST says new servers and features were installed to facilitate the transition to the virtual class.
“Because of the corona virus outbreak leading to the subsequent closure of the universities we decided to digitise our system and then also bring our students to our virtual classroom to learn, before then it was used by only the distant learning students but it became necessary that we migrate all the regular students to also have their studies or complete the semester online,’’ he said.
“So we had to install new servers because the old servers were not big enough to accommodate over sixty-five thousand students of KNUST. Now you’ll realize that we have brought the entire university to our virtual space and we have now nine features before then we had only the virtual classroom. Once you are a student and you have your username and password you just log on, everything is there for students for free,” Dr Agyapong added.
The addition of Prempeh II Library to the facilities on campus comes, perhaps, with even greater excitement.
Dr Henry Kofi Mensah is Head of KNUST Department of Human Resource and Organisational Development.
“We also have the digitised library of the university, we chose to digitise it because in the corona period we do not need to cramp ourselves and assess various books in the library so we thought that we will digitise this place where students wherever they find themselves will be able to assess it with their credentials,” he explained.
“We also have the turn-it-in, it’s a plagiarism software because student will be submitting assignments and because we want to ensure that our students are ethical and they respect all academic requirement we have place this so that students can text the extent of similarities between their work and other peoples work,” Dr. Mensah stressed.
Meanwhile, lecturers who are unfamiliar with the virtual class platform are undergoing training to enable them access it with ease.
Click on the link below to have a look at the Virtual platform;
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Source: Www.thrillernewsgh.com