Institute of Education Trains Quality Assurance Officers of Colleges of Education

A two-day Training Workshop for Quality Assurance Officers of the various Colleges of Education has opened at the University. The theme of the workshop is “Technical and Facilitating factors for the Implementation of Quality Assurance in Colleges of Education”. It is being organized by the Institute of Education, University of Cape Coast (UCC). The Workshop is aimed at providing hands-on activities, as a way of promoting best practices that would enhance students’ learning experience, and thus safeguard academic standards and quality in Colleges of Education. In a speech read by the Vice Dean of the School of Educational Development and Outreach, Dr. Christine Adu-Yeboah, on behalf of the Director of the Institute of Education, Prof. Frederick Ocansey, noted that the importance of quality assurance in higher institutions has come to the fore in both local and global contexts especially, with the coming into force of internationalisation and mobility of higher education clients. This, Prof. Ocansey said, was against the backdrop of the awareness that success of higher education institutions depended, to a large extent, on quality assurance and improvement mechanisms that were operational in the institutions. According to the Director, as mentoring institutions to the Colleges of Education, UCC through the Institute of Education was playing its role to support the colleges to maintain high academic standards and students’ success. He added that the Institute of Education has rolled out a number of workshops to help improve the capacity of staff of the colleges since 2014. Prof. Ocansey hoped participants would share information and knowledge gained in the workshop with their colleagues in their respective colleges. He entreated the participants to take advantage of the opportunity to tap into rich expertise of the resource persons. Explaining the purpose of the workshop, Mr. N. K. Kutor of the Institute said there was the need to provide participants with a firm grounding on what they were doing since without a firm grasp of the task they could not perform well. Quoting Alexander Pope, Mr. Kutor said, “A little learning is dangerous, drink deep or taste not”. Mr. said some of the colleges had problems with quality assurance and, therefore, the training programme would help them generate reports for their superiors. He also noted that the workshop would serve as capacity building to those who already know what would be preseted during the two-day period.