Ghana Library Authority secures licence for 1000 Ghanaian learners

The Ghana Library Authority (GhLA) has secured scholarship slots for 1,000 Ghanaians to pursue online courses in some renowned universities on the Coursera platform.

Under the arrangement, successful candidates have up to December 31, 2020 to pursue as many short courses as possible in renowned and recognised universities.

Coursera is one of the leading, globally recognised Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms because of its association with top universities such as the Stanford University,the Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania and many others in offering online courses.

Online learning

This is the second time the GhLA is offering the opportunity for Ghanaians to undertake online courses to upgrade their knowledge and skills in their areas of interest.

Earlier this year, the authority, in partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL), launched the Read2skill project to offer 1,000 online scholarships to Ghanaians to study on the Udemy platform.

As a result of the massive response from Ghanaians, the Commonwealth of Learning offered 1,400 more scholarship slots which is currently being utilised by the successful applicants to acquire new skills.

Speaking on the project in an interview, the Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, Mr Hayford Siaw explained that the idea was to encourage Ghanaians to learn from home as the world continued to fight the novel COVID-19 pandemic.

High interest

“The GhLA, with support from the CoL, is offering 1,000 additional online scholarships but this time on a different online learning platform called Coursera. Coursera is an online learning platform just like Udemy and offers a myriad of online courses for its learners,” Mr Siaw explained.

He said the authority received over 30,000 applications few weeks after the Read2Skill project was launched out of which only 2,400 were offered the opportunity.

Mr Siaw,therefore, explained that because of the backlog of almost 28,000 applicants on the waiting list, “we will not accept new applications.

“All Ghanaians who applied in our initial Read2Skill call for applications but were not selected should remain hopeful of a better chance to study on Coursera,” he added.

Courses

Mr Siaw said the Coursera worked with universities and other organisations to offer over 5000 online courses in engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities among others.

“These courses provide quizzes, weekly exercises, peer-graded assignments and sometimes a final project or exam. Courses are also provided on-demand in which case users can take their time to complete the course with all material available at once,” he added.

Mr Siaw,  however, reminded successful individuals that they would have to start and complete their courses on or before December 31, 2020, by which time the sponsorship would have ended.