Ghana needs to ensure academic materials make their way online, says the director-general of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence, Dorothy Gordon.

The call comes amid problems encountered last year when the University of Ghana failed to admit thousands of students because of infrastructural and logistical constraints.

Gordon said such problems could be reduced if school authorities started online courses to reach out to a high number of students particularly in the rural and far places.

She pressed government to start rewarding universities for the number of courses they offered online and the number of students who signed onto those courses.

“This will help unleash the potential of the masses who could not gain admission into the brick and mortar system where students had to physically congregate for teaching and learning activities,” she said.

Speaking on the topic, ‘Open University; Option for Mass Education in Ghana’, in a symposium at the on-going 65th Annual New Year School event, the ICT expert urged tertiary institutions in the country to adopt the open university system to mitigate lingering problems confronting the education sector.

She said the system could reduce residential facility difficulties, acute shortage of lecture halls, as well as overcrowding; and ensure guaranteed education for the masses towards transformation of the society for better social and economic lives.

The chief information technology officer of the University of Ghana, Lucas Chigabatia, noted a lack of connectivity and irregular power supplies as well as insufficient infrastructure that has partly accounted for schools sticking to traditional ways of delivering instructions.

However, he said, it was time educational institutions moved away from that system to reach out to millions of students across the nation and the globe.

“The time to use ICT to transform the education sector, and to change the national economy into a knowledge-based one for enhanced prosperity and dignified lives is now,” said Chigabatia.