Kevin Coriolan | Staff Writer

You’re missing out this semester. Haven’t you noticed the freedom of having no coursework assigned? How about the low cost of readings given out? You surely must have enjoyed only having one lecture per week for every course you’ve registered for.

Granted, this beaver has been attending a completely different school accompanied by a completely different education system. I’ve seen how education can vary by taking courses at the University of Ghana via Buena Vista University’s (BVU) study abroad department.

For starters, Ghana teaches under the British system which I’ve found to be a load of “teach yourself” techniques. Lecturers give their views on certain matters and theories that students must independently contemplate. The learners’ dissections of opinions are conducted away from the classroom. There’s near zero interaction with the professors. To really learn, you must go out and research further intellectual resources. Many of the readings handed out are photocopied, short excerpts from reports and textbooks, which is the reason they’re so inexpensive. American copyright laws would strictly prohibit this, but that’s another matter.

This system offers one lecture a week per course. That’s two hours of listening to a political science professor ramble on about issues involving the idea of universal human rights. The extra hours not being used to gobble up what the teacher serves can be used for the independent research a University of Ghana student must set out to accomplish. Then everyone involved returns in a week. Same time. Same place.

Upon leaving the hostel (what Americans call a dorm) to attend such a class, a student may actually be doing the most rigorous physical exercise of the day. Walking is a must on a campus as big as the University of Ghana’s. The campus holds almost 30,000 students, according to their website. In case you’re wondering, that’s about thirty BVU’s. Sometimes a Ghanaian may take up to half an hour to reach the lecture hall. It takes about a third of that time for me to walk from Liberty to the Scurve.

Speaking of records, I hit both a personal high and low in terms of class size with a couple hundred students in a hall one day and only six of us another day. Some courses have lectures blared through speakers by means of microphones in order for all to hear sufficiently while other courses sit on the verge of interactive when professors match faces of students to their names. Classes can vary like this because of the size of the University of Ghana. Buena Vista University has a constant number of students in the classroom ranging from ten to twenty in my experiences.

It’s also that time of the year when college kids are most stressed out; finals are upon us. Actually, it may be even more hectic depending on where you attend school. The University of Ghana bases a large chunk of a student’s final grade on the final exam. In fact, most courses offer no assignments, resulting in the only points coming from the final. Beavers have the opportunity to accumulate points over time, a system I’ve grown accustomed to over the past two years.

In the end, both schools strive to prepare students for the real world. The University of Ghana is an institution with goals set to “develop world-class human resources and capabilities to meet national development needs,” as stated by their mission statement. Meanwhile, across the pond, my home university of BVU looks to “develop students for lifelong success through innovative and imaginative academic and professional preparation.” Similar undertakings, but there’s plenty of distance between the education systems.

Photo courtesy of Kevin Coriolan