Evaluation of Distance Education and Widening Access to Higher Education in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue VII, July 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

Evaluation of Distance Education and Widening Access to Higher Education in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

R. Essel, P. Osei-Poku, H. Barton-Essel, A. A. Saah
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Abstract:- The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology is one of the public universities in Ghana which runs distance education.Distance education has come to stay. This is because many people want to climb the educational ladder and due to large numbers of qualified applicants who cannot further their education by attending the traditional university, they opt for distance education.Although the university started running distance education programmes in 2005, no evaluation has been done except a few studies by Osei et al., in (2013) and Badu et al., (2007).In every country, education is of great importance because it plays a major role in the life of the individual and the country as a whole. Whatever manpower the country needs could be attained if the curriculum of the education system is well structured and geared towards its manpower needs.

Key Words: Distance Education, instruction, access, interchangeably, evaluate

I. INTRODUCTION

Distance education has been defined by various authorities. To cite as an example, Moore and Kearsley (1996) say that distance education is education that is planned and it usually takes place in a different setting and not the normal classroom setting. It therefore needs special patterns of designing the course, delivering instructions, unique styles of communication together with organizational and administrative arrangements. To them, the concept is seen as both students and teachers being separated by time and distance. Due to limited resources, universities turned a lot of qualified applicants down until such a time that the Ghana government policy on tertiary institutions made it possible to consider distance education as an alternative to widening access. The developed countries took the lead in offering distance education.

One can easily tell that in the case of widening access to education, taking into consideration higher educational institutions such as the universities, distance education happens to be one of the ways to make education open and more accessible. The issue of the universities evaluating distance education is not often done. For this reason, this research is conducted in order to evaluate distance education in KNUST and also to find out how to make distance education in KNUST more accessible.

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