The advent of COVID 19 brought about the necessity of moving away from solely engaging students/learners regularly on face-to-face lessons. As a result of this, University of Education, Winneba introduced the Learning Management System (LMS) to her affiliate Colleges of Education to help in teaching and learning in these Colleges. However, when it was introduced to the Colleges, many tutors and students alike found the LMS quite challenging in terms of the elements of the interface and the general usage.
Painting from this, the Institute for Teacher Education and Continuing Professional Development (ITECPD) of the University of Education, Winneba, saw the need to organize a workshop for some selected tutors of affiliate Colleges of Education to train them as master trainers to also train their colleague tutors afterwards.
The director of ITECPD, Prof. Dandy G. Dampson, gave the welcome address. He began by extending greetings and well wishes from the Vice Chancellor or UEW to all participants. He admonished participants to take up courses to upgrade themselves to higher levels of their profession for as he put it, “as teachers, our business is our professional development”.
This he said is one of the priorities of UEW as a mentoring university of the affiliate Colleges of Education. He again briefed participants on the essence of the workshop, that participants and tutors in the colleges need to be familiar and comfortable with the LMS stressing the fact that online teaching and learning have come to stay and teachers and learners alike need to embrace it.
The first activity for day was led by Mr. Humphrey A. K. Pufaa on the topic, Teaching Online. He emphasized the role of teachers in online learning as being Visible, Organised, Caring, Analytical and Leader by Example (VOCAL). Finally, he touched on some instructional strategies that can be used and then on Online Classroom Management.
The second session for the day was led by Dr. K. Kwaa-Aidoo on the topic Multimedia (ICT TooBox, Videos, Images etc.). He took participants through a vivid and interactive session of searching for information online be it text, audio or video. Various search strategies as well as advance search strategies were dealt with.
On the second day, The topic for the morning session was Teaching with Moodle, which was facilitated by Dr. A. K. Kwaa-Aidoo. Participants were first taken through characteristics of traditional classroom versus online classroom, that online classroom emphasizes the constructivist theory of learning.
Mr. Rafique K. Agyare came in for the second session on working with assignments and quizzes on the LMS. He took participants through how to create assignments and upload them onto the LMS.
On the last day, Mr. Rafique Agyare, took participants through the Course Administration Menu of the Moodle. Participants were introduced to issues like how to enroll/unenroll students/users, whether self or manual. Making backups of one’s account’s content on the Moodle were also well dealt with.
The session and therefore the workshop came to an end on the third day.
Prof. Dandy G. Dampson, director of ITECPD gave the final closing remarks and urged participants to endeavour to send the good news to all other tutors in their various colleges by organizing workshops for them to also be abreast with the LMS.
