Library Authority secures license for 1000 Ghanaians to study on Coursera

The Ghana Library Authority (GhLA) has secured scholarship slots for 1000 Ghanaians to study on Coursera. Coursera is one of the leading, globally recognized Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) platforms because of its association with top universities like Stanford University, Yale University, University of Pennsylvania and many others in offering online courses.

The Authority in partnership with the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL), earlier this year, launched the Read2skill project to offer 1000 online scholarships to Ghanaians to study on Udemy. As a result of the massive response from Ghanaians, the Commonwealth of Learning offered 1400 more scholarship slots which is currently been utilized by the successful applicants to acquire new skills.

Speaking on the project, the Executive Director of the Ghana Library Authority, Mr. Hayford Siaw stated, “to encourage Ghanaians to learn from home as the world fights the novel COVID-19 pandemic, the GhLA, with support from the CoL is offering 1000 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.”

“The Authority received over 30,000 applications few weeks after the Read2Skill project was launched. Therefore, we will not accept new applications, since we have about 28, 000 applications which were denied enrollment due to limited slots”, he emphasized.

Mr. Siaw added that 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.

Coursera works with universities and other organizations to offer online over 5000 courses in engineering, data science, machine learning, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, humanities and 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 of the material available at once.

Successful individuals would have to start and complete their courses before 31 December 2020.