Academic institutions in Ghana have been urged to prioritize benchmarking in the attainment of their mission and vision statements.
Benchmarking is the systematic process of searching for best practices, innovative ideas and highly effective operating procedures that lead to superior performance.
Many experts in the field of education believe benchmarking is relevant for increased productivity and continuous growth.
They believe benchmarking has even become more significant in the 21st Century because of the issue of competition.
Professor Isaac Luginaah, a Distinguished Professor at Western University, Canada and an alumnus of the University of Cape Coast has been speaking with ATL FM NEWS on this subject.
This was at the sidelines of a Research Excellence Guest Lecture organized by the UCC Directorate of Research, Innovation and Consultancy.
Professor Luginaah who was the Guest Speaker at the event delivered the lecture on the topic: “Building a Research Excellence Career/Institution in the 21st Century: The Importance of Quality and Benchmarking.”
According to him, if academic institutions want to produce excellent research and produce good students, they must consider benchmarking.
“We have mass competition around the world and to be amongst the best you need to look at what others are doing well so that you can use them to improve your own ways of doing things,” he said.
Meanwhile, during the lecture, he lamented how universities in Ghana are churning out graduates who do not know the basics of research.
He shared how in his line of work he once encountered some students who completed the university with First Class Honours but were lacking in the area of research.
“I can tell you that Ghanaian students with First Class arriving in our university, in my lab, they don’t know what standard deviation is. What happened? These were things we did manually. What is going on? What is going on that you get the First Class without any basics in research?”
Professor Luginaah blames the challenge on the recent increase in student population.
“When I was here [at UCC] the whole university population was like 1,500 and now we are looking at the student population of 75,000. So there is a lot of overwhelming in the system I think. That, the rigour that you need is a little bit tough to implement in a class of thousand and something because how do you get enough laboratory facilities for very huge classes? So it’s just challenging,” he noted.
He, however, says the best solution is for universities to pay attention to the resources they need to successfully carry out their responsibilities as well as the kind of knowledge they are imparting to their students.
“Maybe the best way out is literally to look at the resources the universities need to produce the content they want to do which is part of the benchmarking. What content do you want to get into your students and how do we go about to make sure that they get that content? That’s exactly part of the benchmarking process,” Prof Isaac Luginaah emphasized.
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Source: Rosemond Asmah/ATLFMNEWS
