The University of Education, Winneba (UEW) says it is ready to welcome over 30,000 new students across the country.
Some of these students are part of the first batch of students of the Free Senior High School (SHS) programme.
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Education, Winneba, Professor Anthony Afful-Broni, in a Citi News interview said the university has so far received over 52,000 applications from students seeking to pursue various programmes.
“We are going to take a total of about 30,000 students. It may even be more…But as far as facilities are concerned, we are purchasing new services, we are enhancing our equipment, we are doing well to employ more competent IT people, even lecturers and administrators to support the delivery of a very effective and robust academic programme for our university,” he said.
The Vice-Chancellor further said “Some of the specific things that as a university we are going to do is to introduce the hybrid form of delivery so any particular student coming to this university will not necessarily be expected to meet lecturers in the classrooms throughout. We are going to arrange things such that all our facilities will be available online. For instance sitting in a classroom for three hours will be a thing of the past since there will be one hour face-to-face lectures and two hours of online relationship,” the Vice-Chancellor said.
Afful-Broni noted that the university is adequately prepared to welcome first-year students.
The Vice-Chancellor indicated that the university has upscaled infrastructure even within the constraints of its meagre resources in support of President Akufo-Addo’s Free SHS.
“It will interest you to know that within the two years of my administration we have constructed fourteen lecture theatres across Winneba, Kumasi and Mampong campuses and out of the fourteen, ten of them are located in Winneba campus while eight of the lecture theatres have also been completed and will be commissioned within a month.”
“The university is not new to ensuring that COVID-19 protocols are observed because when President Akufo-Addo announced for schools to be opened, we had already completed work, but we opened our doors for students, who for one or two reasons had not been able to access our lectures online to come to campus. We did very well in ensuring that in places where there were supposed to be ten people in normal times. We scaled it down to five, and so we are prepared to ensure that the established COVID-19 protocols are properly observed,” Prof. Afful-Broni intimated.
Public and private universities across the country were instructed to resume academic work for final year students.
The partial resumption saw final year students returning to school on June 15, 2020, to take their exit exams.
Nursery, kindergarten, primary, Junior High School (JHS) 1 and Senior High School (SHS) 1 students had the rest of their 2019/2020 academic year postponed till January 2021.
This was announced by President Nana Akufo-Addo on Sunday, August 31, 2020, during his 16th COVID-19 update to Ghanaians.
He said, per consultations with the Ghana Education Service (GES), the resumption of the next academic year in January 2021 will be made “with appropriate adjustments to the curriculum to ensure that nothing is lost from the previous year.”