THE University of Guyana will be continuing its classes online for the first semester of academic year 2020/2021, starting from October 5, 2020.
The university is happy that it managed to deliver upwards of 80 per cent of its courses online during the first safe mode period (March to July).
According to a release, though the university lost 473 of its 8,700 students during this period, every effort is being made during this New Year to better support the delivery and capacity of lecturers and to bring back those students who had to withdraw for various reasons.
These reasons included access to Internet, access to computers or suitable phones, difficult personal circumstances, inability to adapt and power instability in some areas.

Over the next three years as UG develops its online and blended capacity, the university could spend around US$3 million to put protective measures in place and convert to a top-of-the-line blended mode.

While this process has been fast tracked to begin this year, it will be rolled out over a few years.
Internationally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, over 33 per cent of global universities have been unable to deliver and have been forced to close.

“It is projected that 50 per cent of universities which closed may close permanently. It should be noted that UG never closed but moved online almost immediately. For those universities that remained open scrambling to respond to the pandemic by getting online, attrition rates (withdrawals and dropouts) average from eight to 23 per cent globally. Compared to this, UG’s rate was 5.5 per cent. While the university acknowledges, as most university’s worldwide have done, that the move online was far from perfect, the fact that the University of Guyana was able to move from 100 courses online in December 2019 to 900 by July 2020 and to deliver these successfully to over 8,000 students, including adapting assessments and university’s polices at the same time, was a test of resilience, determination, creativity and dedication of the staff and students at the university,” the release said.
UG refused to give up in the face of grave adversity produced by two difficult coinciding situations in Guyana, but delivered in the best way it could, the release added.

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Paloma Mohamed–Martin has outlined and underscored the administrations gratitude to staff, students and collaborating partners and re-stated the university’s commitment to supporting educated and exemplary citizen students for Guyana.
The university, the release said, is doing everything reasonably possible in the present context to significantly improve its online systems in the coming semester.