Exploring the Socioeconomic Facet of Online Inclusive Education in Ghana: The Effects of Technological Advancement in Academia

Introduction

The 21^st century is an era of technology (Raja & Nagasubramani, 2018). In contemporary times, technologies play a significant role in everyone’s day-to-day livelihoods. It is seen as the basis of economic growth. An economy that is deficient in technology can barely grow in the scenarios faced today. Thus, the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) had become a necessity. In Africa, as in Asia, however, the necessity was “perhaps more immediate than in most other developing regions” (Sachs & McArthur, 2002). Africa now stands at the threshold of development that requires a new approach to technological advancement and long-term economic growth. The evolution of technological advancement has had an impact on nearly all dimensions of life conquering every viable field, one of which is education (Sheoran, 2012). Technological advancement has merged with education in two fundamental ways. First, it enhances the need for training, such as teaching personnel how to use new equipment when it arrived in an organization (Dočekal & Tulinská, 2015). Technologies were likewise fused into education by presenting new prospects that permit an expansion of productivity of educational activities. At the same time, technological advancement can be expressed in questions about the current curriculum and the methods by which it was implemented.

It is essential to appreciate the complex nature of technologies to merge these effectively and in a responsible manner into quality education (Manichander, 2020). There are different scopes of a scholarly approach to the meaning of technology. The classical Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, espoused the connection between moral life and the use of tools and skills to convert raw materials into useful and creative articles (Drengson, 1995). They saw relations between the teaching of craft persons and the improvement of the complete individual. An early idea of technology as information held that technology is generally appropriate and easy to replicate and re-use (Wahab et al., 2012). In terms of the social shaping of technologies, MacKenzie and Wacjman (1985) explained technology as the incorporation of physical matter or relics, the procedure of shaping the matter, and the meaning linked with the physical matter. A definition provided by Maskus (2004) had widened the notion of technologies, where these were explained as the data essential to attain a certain intervention outcome from a particular means of combining or processing selected inputs that included production processes, intra-firm organizational structures, management techniques, and means of finance, marketing methods or any such combinations. As per Brey (2009), although it is hard to advance the meaning of technology, scholars do undeniably identify what it is and separate things that are artificial and natural. A study of past accounts discloses the obvious connection between knowledge of technology and a person’s capacity to discern between artificial and natural occurrences.

As established above, technologies had become one of the most fundamental building blocks of modern industrial society (Barakabitze et al., 2019). The proficient understanding of the rudimentary skills and concepts of information communication technologies are now highly validated and adopted by many countries in Africa for teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). While ICTs have been initiated in education in Ghana, the technology evolution and its advancement remain sluggish due to a lack of productive ICT schemes and long-running support for ICT infrastructure (e.g., electricity, Internet, software, and hardware devices), teacher capacity, and financial resources. Hence, the introduction of technologies within the educational sector in Ghana has had some impact, both negative and positive.