UEW students fume over online exams portal

Students of the University of Education, Winneba, have expressed dissatisfaction with an online test portal known as ‘LMS' being introduced by the management of the university.

The school’s management a few weeks back notified students of the new Learning Management System.

“Please, we bring to your attention, reviewed Academic Calendar for the 2019/2020 second semester which was approved by the Executive Committee at its sitting on April 17th, 2020. The new Calendar is in respect of the migration of all lectures to the online Moodle mode,” the authorities announced.

The school then went on to publish a provisional time-table for online mid-semester examinations for all campuses.

However, students have called for a revision of the online portal since it does not work efficiently. They have complained that the website crashes when a large number of students are logged on.

The same situation occurred at the University of Professional Studies, Accra and the Ghana Institute of Journalism where students kicked against online learning.

A student who spoke to starrfm.com.gh on condition of anonymity said “you will pick an answer, it will load and load and load and in the long run it will tell you that you had zero over ten. We should put a stop to it”.

Another student said “the LMS is not able to hold the total student capacity and you can’t say that the lecturers should put the whole day on just a quiz, then it means the quiz is not authentic. Someone will try and do it, screenshot it and send to others and they will have too much time to solve the quiz. To make quiz authentic, it should be within a stipulated time and the LMS is not able to do that. So, what we simply want to say is they should just halt the online exams for now until they think the LMS will be able to hold the total student capacity at a go.”



“The problem that we are facing on this LMS is not all about network issue. But here is the case that the LMS system is very bad. Because when there are many users on the system at a particular time then the LMS starts misbehaving, that’s what I’ve seen,” another lamented.

Another added “If you open the LMS and there’s a quiz uploading there and the system says 20 minutes for 10 questions. If you answer the first question, it will take like 15 minutes for the next question to pop-up. So, by the time you finish the time will be up and you won’t be able to answer any question.”

Meanwhile, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Prof. Andy Ofori-Birikorang advised students who had rented hostels within communities around campuses of the University and who had gone home to remote locations that made it challenging for them to access internet for their active participation in the UEW-LMS Moodle system to come back to their off-campus rented hostels where the telecommunications network is better.