Lecturers express optimism as Skill4Success trainers’ workshop ends

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Lecturers and tutors who benefitted from the ‘Skills4Success’ workshop are optimistic the programme will help them enhance teaching and impact their students with the necessary digital skills.

The ‘Skills4Success’ programme, which started in November last year, was developed by the British Council in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission to address the challenges of media and information literacy (MIL) and factual writing skills of youths in selected African Countries.

This is because they are confident advanced digital literacy and factual writing skills are crucial in contemporary higher education settings and also to job readiness.

The programme engaged a total of 26 lecturers and student tutors selected from the various colleges of education and universities across the country and equipped them with digital skills aimed at improving the academic performance of their students and employability.

Speaking to the media, Senior Lecturer, Department of English at the University of Cape Coast, Dr. Samuel Kwesi Nkansah said given that the new curriculum makes provision for the inclusion of Information Communication Technology (ICT) training, the ‘Skills4Success’ programme was very crucial and in the right direction.

“For those of us involved in training teachers for our basic schools, it is imperative that we find ways of making teaching more effective and relevant. The journey has been very fruitful and the programme was aimed at helping us educate our students well. We can now go out there and implement the knowledge we have acquired here,” he said.

A tutor at the Jasikan College of Education, Alfred Kwami Teni added that the programme has exposed many of them to innovative ways of teaching with the internet and other digital devices.

Head of Professional Development Center, Aga Khan Academy at Mombasa, Dr. Maina Anthony Gioko who was one of the trainers said, since students spend the most time in school, training their teachers makes it easy to pass on this knowledge to as many of them and this will help them make decisions about what information to take in, share, and not share.

“I am happy about the people selected, because we have professors in technology and in language, and this integration is right.  We the trainers also showed them a range of possible technologies in class, meaning they have toolkits to choose from to implement and impact teaching and learning,” he said.

For her part, Regional Support Schools Manager at the British Council, Ms. Shongai Ziki said “most of the lecturers during the training have attained a better understanding of how to utilise the internet as a learning and research resource” adding that materials were developed with inputs and feedbacks from key stakeholders to also help them transfer these skills to the students.

The programme which is currently being piloted in Ghana is expected to be extended to other African countries, including Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.

In particular, this project focuses on the development of media and information literacy helping students and teachers to better access and interrogate information online for their academic and personal lives.

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