Place Students At Heart Of Education Agenda – Kaleo-Bioh
The Head of Client Coverage, Corporate and Investment Banking at Stanbic Bank, Dinah Kaleo-Bioh, has called on educational institutions to make students the centre of the policies for continuity and sustainability. Dinah Kaleo-Bioh was speaking as the Guest Speaker at the 13th congregation of the Garden City University College, Kenyasi-Kumasi.
Speaking on the theme “Post-COVID-19 and the Educational Enterprise: Innovative Strategies to Stay in Business”, Dinah Kaleo-Bioh said the educational demands of the new normal requires a ‘Student Centricity Model’. She mentioned that “The business of education or educational enterprise is becoming more costly to run because of all the challenges that have emanated from the Covid pandemic. Schools have been forced to invest more in IT infrastructure to stay on top of issues. Training programmes have had to be run at high cost for staff to be abreast with these new technologies. In fact, the investment into these new technologies alone can be crippling”.
“Tertiary education has moved into the realm of what I call marketization, where these institutions have become fully functional corporate bodies that aim at providing quality services, ensuring growth on both the top line and the bottom line with an improved social image to attract the best students. This is especially true for private universities. The need to strategize is not just to stay afloat, but also to be resilient and sustainable irrespective of the storms in the business environment. These strategies will need to be diverse enough to attract the attention of parents and students. I want to call this ‘The Student Centricity Model”. This model puts students at the centre of whatever decision the school takes,” she added.
She also said advised educational institutions to adopt alternative modules to online teaching given the low level of internet penetration in the country. She noted that “With the limited coverage and high cost of internet services in our country, it will be difficult for all our students to participate in the live online learning sessions as is now increasingly practiced, but this should not prevent us from offering our services to more students. We may consider having pre-recorded modules on-line where students can choose to access these classes at midnight when bandwidth are at their cheapest.”
Dinah Kaleo-Bioh further encouraged educational institutions to prioritize investments in technology as technology is central to the delivery of all services, including education in this era. According to her, “Technology is at the core of strategies to deliver services in this era.
By this, all staff must be tech savvy. Staff must be trained to acquire adequate skills to operate within the technological environment and must have a warm attitude especially toward our paymasters i.e. the students. In addition to that, you must be marketing oriented. All staff must be able to give anyone who walks into the institution some basic information on the programmes offered by the institution and other services that set the institution apart from the competition.”