Pro-Vice-Chancellor Receives Two Officials from University of Nottingham

The Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Prof. George K. T. Oduro, has received two officials from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, at his office. The two officials were Prof Keith Spriggs of the School of Pharmacy and Mrs. Emma Tayou, the West Africa representative of UoN. The two officials were also accompanied by Mr. Patrick Ayande, a staff member of UCC and a PhD candidate at UoN. Welcoming the officials, Prof. Oduro expressed the gratitude to the officials on behalf of the Vice-Chancellor and management of the University. He thanked them for showing interest to collaborate with the University. He indicated that UCC was exploring avenues for collaboration with world class universities that would provide benchmark for the University as part of its internationalisation agenda. He was optimistic that once the two institutions sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), the relationship would be enhanced to create more opportunities for the two parties. The Pro-Vice-Chancellor mentioned the challenges confronting the UCC as far as lecturer to student ratio was concerned, stating that “by the norms we should have one lecturer to 25 students for the humanities and one lecturer to 20 students for the sciences but in practice we have about one lecturer to 200 students on the average and in some cases 400”. He, therefore, called on the officials to assist UCC to train more lecturers to acquire PhD through scholarships or at an affordable cost. The Provost of the College of Health and Allied Sciences, Prof. Johnson Nyarko Boampong, who was at meeting, said there had been a discussion between the College and UoN officials about the possibility of designing split site PhD programmes for lecturers without terminal degrees. He also indicated that they had booked an appointment with the Minister for Education adding that “we want him to help UCC to secure scholarship from the Ghana Education Trust Fund for UCC staff”. He noted that the two officials had agreed to assist the College to run the Pharmacy programme to be introduced in the 2017/2018 academic year. On his part, Prof. Spriggs said the UoN aimed at collaborating with UCC in mutual beneficial relationship, especially in the areas of research and training. He assured the Pro-Vice-Chancellor that UoN would support UCC to train lecturers. In the area of research, he said the two partners could be exploiting complementary skills and expertise. He also mentioned staff/student exchanges, summer schools, sharing teaching strategies and materials were some of the opportunities that would be created through the collaboration. He further indicated UoN was interested in joint research “in neglected tropical diseases, antimicrobial resistance, seed/crop protection”.