The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers, Thomas Musah, has disclosed that some 200 teachers will benefit from the emergency remote teaching techniques project in the country.

Following this, some fifty teachers from the Ashanti Region have been resourced with digital tools. This is to meet the educational demands of the 21st century.

In line with this, the UNESCO-Korean Funds-in-Trust is providing Emergency Remote Teaching training to both pre-and in-service teachers.

This, aligns with the Sustainable Development Goal 4. As such, the projects aim to ensure inclusive and equal quality education through ICT.

The Emergency Remote Teaching will help teachers implement strategies to teach online using low-tech technologies in remote areas.

Currently, the resourced teachers hail from 43 districts and were trained in Emergency Remote Training which aims at improving learning outcomes.

Furthermore, the teachers were trained using the 11 training modules from the UNESCO ICT Essential for Teachers.

Per data, some 9.2 million students from Kindergarten to Senior High School and 450,000 teachers were affected by the closure of schools as a result of Covid-19.

Education in pandemic

On his part, the National Associate Project Officer UNESCO-Ghana, Eric Balangtaa, revealed that the entrance of the pandemic has made it known that proximity isn’t an issue when it comes to education.

“Covid has taught us that education cannot wait. The face-to-face way of teaching is gradually giving way to digital and online teaching. Distance should not be a barrier for teaching and learning.

“UNESCO through the Korean government has been implementing this project in other African countries prior to the advent of Covid basically to leverage ICT to be able to teach effectively”.

Also, the Ashanti Regional Coordinator of Basic and Second-cycle schools, Juliet Agyemang Duah, commended UNESCO-Korean Funds-in-Trust and other agencies for the training.

“If teachers had knowledge of digital training, most of the teachers would have taught their students via the internet during the Covid-19 pandemic but we had no idea about digital teaching.

“GES had to spend a lot campaigning around to get students back to school from post COVID.

“We’re grateful to UNESCO and all the agencies that made this training possible”.

Additionally, participants were presented with certificates by the Ministry of Education and UNESCO field Office in Accra.

The Center for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling (CENDLOS), National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), National Teaching Council (NTC) and Ghana Education Service (GES) are implementing partners.

The Emergency Remote Teaching training

The ERT training is one of many initiatives under the KFIT Project: ICT in Education in Africa by which UNESCO is supporting the Government to enhance the capacity of teachers across the country.

This is to effectively facilitate teaching and learning during crises period such as being experienced under the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other activities include the ongoing support for review of the Government’s ICT in Education policy and support to CENDLOS to establish a national Open Educational Resources (OER) platform. The platform is to enable educators and learners to have unrestricted access to relevant educational resources to improve teaching and learning.

These interventions are situated within UNESCO’s education sector support to the Member States, which predates the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, this support has been scaled up through the Global Education Coalition initiative which UNESCO launched in March 2020.