The Acting Provost of the College of Distance Education (CoDE), University of Cape Coast, Prof George Oduro, has said from next year the College would institute an Easter School on Distance Education.
He said the Easter School, apart from serving as a visibility agenda for the College it would also create a forum for sustained stakeholder dialogue on quality education issues in the country.
Prof Oduro who announced this during the launch of a Magazine for the College dubbed ?CoDE Digest? in Cape Coast said the Easter School would be similar to Summer School and New Year School held by the University of Ghana.
The 20- page magazine is to tell the story of UCC Distance Education via the lenses of practitioners, create a platform where staff and distance students can share their experiences with the rest of the world and learn from others and also to clarify issues relating to the operations of distance education and inform policy.
It has a six ?member editorial board with Prof Oduro as the Editor In-Chief. Prof Oduro said the launch of the magazine was a dream come true, noting that within a competitive environment, information flow played a key role in giving one competitor an advantage over the other competitors.
He said though UCC Distance Education programme operated within a challenging competitive context, maintaining its role as a pacesetter in Ghana?s distance education required that the college projected its worth through mass communication.
?It is in this light that CoDE initiated the newsletter venture and it is hoped through the CoDE Digest we would be able to encourage both staff and students on the UCC distance mode, share best practices on course facilitation and learning among themselves, make experiential contribution towards national debates on distance education and also make UCC distance education programme more visible nationally and internationally?.
Prof Oduro spoke about the Importance of the Distance Education programme to teachers and thanked the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES) for clarifying issues relating to the recruitment of holders of Diploma from the Distance Education Programmes from the UCC into the teaching service.
He appealed to the Director-General of Education to intervene in situations where some directors of education particularly in the Ashanti Region continued to discriminate against persons who obtained Diplomas and Degrees through the distance education mode.
According to him, information reaching the College suggested that some directors in the Ashanti Region insisted that the Ghana Education Service does not recognize diplomas through the distance mode.
This Prof Oduro said this was affecting the patronage of distance programmes and that if unchecked was likely to adversely affect the Ministry of Education agenda towards promoting open and distance learning.
Prof John Nelson Buah, the Pro-Vice Chancellor of UCC who launched the magazine, commended the Provost and staff of the College for the innovative intellectual-based public image enhancement initiative and asked that space should be created in the magazine for staff of the college and other colleges of the university of Cape Coast to publish their academic work.
