E-learning in Tertiary Education in Ghana: Exploring Its Nuggets and Nuances for Stakeholder Engagement

Electronic teaching and learning continue to soar across all levels of education in Ghana especially following the emergence of covid-19. To this end, plethora of Colleges and Universities are interested in how to best engage e-learners as regards course content. This study explores the dynamics through which taking courses via e-learning medium utilizes student engagement, juxtaposing data from the Ministry of Education-Ghana. Data was analyzed using a series of ordinary least squares regression models, also controlling for relevant student and institutional traits. The results corroborated several significant correlations between e-learning and final years student engagement in Ghana’s tertiary institutions. Those students taking quite a number of online courses were more likely to engage in quantitative reasoning than their other counterparts. Nonetheless, they were less likely to engage in collaborative learning, student-faculty interactions, and discussions with diverse others, compared to their more traditional classroom counterparts. The students with greater numbers of online courses also indicated less exposure to effective teaching practices and lower quality of interactions. The relationship between these engagement indicators and the percentage of classes taken online suggests that an online environment might benefit certain types of engagement but may also be somewhat of a deterrent to others. Institutions should consider these findings when designing online course content and encourage faculty to contemplate ways of encouraging student engagement across a variety of delivery types. Higher learning institutions should blend e-learning with traditional learning so as to fully expose variety of learners to the merits and somewhat demerits of either modes. More importantly, as majority of students who enjoyed the lofty Free Senior High School policy await admissions in tertiary institutions, the researchers recommend that e-learning batch of students be concurrently admitted with normal classroom delivery students so as to ensure increased intake and further ensure no qualified student is left behind due to infrastructural deficit. With this, whilst students are in school for traditional face-to-face sessions, their counterparts are home for e-learning with this practice being rotated on semester basis until such a time infrastructural deficit are addressed.