Build digital skills to enhance employability – KNUST Vice Chancellor urges students

Professor Rita Akosua Dickson, the Vice Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), has urged students to build digital skills and literacy to enhance their employability.

She said while people built their skills in technical abilities, it was important for them to foster a culture of digital literacy and innovation as a way of lifelong learning skills and ultimately enhancing employability.

Mrs Dickson made the call at the opening of the second batch of training for students on the Mastercard Foundation E-Learning Initiative, at KNUST in Kumasi.

The ‘eLearning Student Ambassadors Training,’ which was being supported by the KNUST E-Learning Center, aimed at building the digital skills of about 200 students from KNUST and its affiliate nursing and colleges of education.

The objective is to equip the students with the necessary digital skills and knowledge to help them become proficient online learners, who would subsequently be trainers among their colleagues in their various institutions.

Mrs Dickson said the world was now going digital, and everyone needed to embrace it, saying, KNUST was taking bold steps to encourage students to embrace e-space and succeed in their training.

Mr Courage Julius Logah, the Principal Investigator, KNUST Mastercard Foundation E-Learning Initiative, said with the support of the e-Learning Initiative, the University continued to build capacities of its faculty to develop online contents for continuous studies to occur at any point in time.

The future, he said, was towards e-learning and using digital tools to enhance education, adding that, the project was targeting to offer diverse skills needed for effective learning.

Prof. Eric Appau Asante, Director of the KNUST E-Learning Center, said that participants would undergo hands-on training on learning management systems and how to access and use various e-resources.

He said modules under which participants may learn included psychology of online learning and portfolio building, which sought to expose students to handle issues of anxiety and apprehension, e-resources for digital learning and multimedia tools for online learning.

Others would include branding as online learner, collaborative tools for online learning, video conferencing tools and team building.