University of Cape Coast

Yesterday we had the opportunity to make a trip to Cape Coast, a city about two hours away along the coastal highway. The highway is very modern and very recent, paved sometime in the past 8 years because the current government is taking credit for it. Long trips give us a chance to hear about all sorts of things including the elections which are in December.

Fred Asare arranged for us to be met by Kojo Acquah Beenyi, the minister at the Chapel Hill Church of Christ in Cape Coast. He took us to the university where we met Benjamin, an elder from church, who lectures in Mathematics. Together we went to see John Kwame Eduafo Edumadze who I have been coresponding with about taking a sabbatical from ACU to teach at UCC. We toured the labs, classrooms and offices. The science building is several floors and they have about 1000 computers at the school, tho somewhat limited Internet access (but much better than VOH). UCC offers several different undergraduate degrees in technology fields including Computer Science. They are interested in working with other universities and outside faculty to improve their programs and to design graduate degrees (possibly offered in cooperation with other universites).

As we were about to leave we were introduced to Paul Nyagorme who took us on another tour of the MEd labs. He is chiefly responsible for the MEd ICT degree (Masters of Education in Information Computer Technology, I think) which is currently housed in the distance education program since it is primarily targeted at improving Ghanaian teaching.

We are considering/planning toward spending a year in Ghana if all the right pieces come together. In addition to meeting whoever was available and seeing the campus I wanted to arrange to get a letter of invitation to help in attaining a scholarship for my sabbatical. John will be able to sent one soon.

Everyone here is looking forward to us having an opportunity to be in the country for a year. Of course they would rather we were closer, such as in Accra, but the traffic and roads in Accra make the trip about as long as to Cape Coast, which was a very nice drive.

Dwayne