The Director of the Institute for Distance Education and e-Learning (IDeL) of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW) Prof. Francis Owusu Mensah has hinted that the institute will establish study centres in selected West African countries.

This came to light at the opening of a three-week workshop for selected mentors for Supported Teaching in Schools (STS) drawn from schools within the forty (40) study centres of IDeL across the country held in Kumasi.

These are schools that students from Distance Education programmes will be doing their internships with.

According to him a good number of students from West African Countries come to Ghana to access high quality higher education programmes, hence the need to internalise IDeL programmes.

"With Covid-19 and restrictions on the physical movement of people, the College is preparing seriously to establish centres in neighbouring West African Countries".

He added that students who want to access quality UEW programmes can remain in their home countries and benefit from it.

We will put in place a tutorial system "Student Support System" where selected academics, professionals will be trained in their various countries where the centres are and they will be recruited to offer in-person training to support online training that will be offered," he revealed.

Staff from time to time will travel to find out what is happening and to supervise some of the teaching and learning activities he stated.

He added that all 450 participants in different schedules will be taking part in the 3-week workshop.

The mentors are expected to train the students to become professional teachers and come out as competent 21st-century basic school teachers, he revealed.

The Director opined that the institute will soon become a College, expand and roll out additional programmes.

The institute has brought together seasoned, experienced facilitators involved in this capacity building for a very long time, who are also lecturers of UEW and at the forefront of the current Basic Education 4 year curriculum being implemented by the Ghana Education Service.

Every year the institute organises workshops and has so far organised a series of workshops to train tutors on the use of UEW Learning Management System (LMS), ICT tutors on how to support their colleagues in teaching on UEW Learning Management System, a workshop for the centre coordinators on how to register students on ITS, a new system that the University has rolled on.

This is all geared towards refreshing staff and making them current with trends in Distance Education.