UCC to broadcast education programmes

The University of the Commonwealth Caribbean (UCC) has announced new initiatives to utilise information communication technology (ICT) to deliver courses and programmes.

Speaking on July 23 at UCC's commencement ceremony, Dr Winston Adams, group executive chairman of the UCC Group, said the institution had recently entered into a partnership agreement with Ready TV.

The partnership will provide broadcasting space to UCC on Ready TVs network, which currently provides coverage to Kingston and St Andrew, parts of St Ann, St Mary and Clarendon ahead of a gradual roll out across the island.

"We will now acquire a cable channel, which will allow us the opportunity to utilise broadcasting space to provide a variety of educational features and programmes," Adams told the gathering which included more than 700 graduands.

He informed that UCC had recently entered into partnerships with online-on-demand course providers Coursera and EdX.

In addition, UCC is partnering with international providers of online, on-demand short professional courses including Udemy and Cisco International. On completion of these interactive video courses, successful participants receive a certificate of achievement from the relevant university.

NEW PARTNERSHIPS

"We believe these new partnerships could potentially further revolutionise our tertiary education sector in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean," Dr Adams said. He noted that over the years UCC, through online programmes, has made an outstanding impact on Caribbean students including graduands from Grenada and St Vincent & the Grenadines who attended the Commencement ceremony.

In this regard, Dr Adams announced an expansion of the range of undergraduate online offerings from six to nine degrees effective Fall 2017. The total number of undergraduate and graduate degree programmes to be offered has been increased to approximately fifty. These include UCC's local graduate degrees the Commonwealth Executive Masters in Business Administration (CEMBA) and Masters in Public Administration (CEMPA) which are also being offered fully online.