As part of efforts to support sustainable change that will have a far reaching impact on Ghana’s educational system, Academic City University College, a premium STEAM and Entrepreneurship tertiary education, has organized a one-day capacity building workshop for heads and counsellors of senior high schools.
The conference, themed, “Defining Future Ready”, brought together over 100 heads of schools, counsellors and teachers from top second cycle institutions across Africa. Also present were representatives of government institutions including the Ministry of Education, and representatives from some NGOs.
The conference sought to provide the platform for teachers and head-teachers to understand and appreciate the importance of combining theories and hands-on experience in changing the landscape of teaching and learning.
With the aid of a virtual reality machine, participants experienced a practical workshop on the topic “Bridging the Gap” to inspire creativity and teamwork.
Other workshops on Universal Learning and Communication, Academic City Teaching Strategies and Understanding the stakeholder helped to sharpen the teaching techniques of participants.
Speaking at the conference, Prof. Fred McBagonluri, President of Academic City expressed the university’s commitment to partnering with relevant stakeholders to improve the quality of education for Africa’s development.
“Academia is very crucial in Africa’s exciting journey to industrialization. At Academic City, we are contributing to this effort by nurturing the next generation of leaders, focusing on experiential and unified learning, a degree of emotional intelligence and also helping them to understand the challenges of the real world,” he noted.
Delivering a paper on the topic, “What does future-ready mean?”, Dr. Lucy Agyepong, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics at Academic City emphasized the need for Ghana’s educational system to focus on preparing the younger generation for the jobs of the future.
“The jobs of the future will be driven by artificial intelligence, robotics and biomedical and it is therefore important for education to mimic what is done in the real world,” she said.
Participants were largely impressed with the event and called for more sessions. Speaking to the media, Rev. Fr. George Obeng Appah, Counsellor of Achimota School, expressed great satisfaction with the presentations and called for the implementation of curricula that groomed entrepreneurs rather than job seekers.