DOI: 10.4324/9781003269625-12 Introduction The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt all over the world, in every sector of society, including education. Bassett and Arnhold (2020) argue that the whole education sector has been seriously impacted by the pan- demic. As of April 2020, universities and other tertiary education institu- tions were temporarily closed in 175 countries (World Bank 2020). These school closures afected over 220 million post-secondary students who had their studies stopped or signifcantly disrupted due to the pandemic. At the time of conducting this study in 2020, countries in Europe and the Americas were witnessing rising infection numbers (WHO 2020). Consequently, there have been uncertainties among university leaders, staf, and students about how long the pandemic would last. Some higher education institutions (HEIs) skipped a whole semester or longer (Lau and Ross 2020). As a result, there is likely to be a 15%–25% reduction in enrolment fgures for some HEIs because of the pandemic (Dennis 2020). In the Ghanaian context, the frst two cases of COVID-19 were reported on 12 March 2020. Consequently, the government activated a national response mechanism including restrictions on travel, mass gatherings including funer- als and churches, border closings, quarantine, and a partial lockdown in sev- eral districts and municipalities in the Greater Accra and the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan areas (UN 2020a,b). With respect to education, the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, ordered temporary clo- sure of all educational institutions in Ghana on 15 March 2020. According to a United Nations briefng from May 2020, approximately 9.2 million basic school students (kindergarten, primary, and junior high schools) and 500,000 tertiary education students were afected by this directive (Ibid.). As a result of the president’s directive, Ghana’s Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) were charged with the responsibility of rolling out online or distance learning programmes to ensure continuous Chapter 9 Institutional approaches to supporting students during the COVID-19 pandemic A comparative study of two Ghanaian public universities’ online learning experiences Paul Kwadwo Addo, George Kwadwo Anane, Charles Marfo, and Abraham Adusei Review Copy – Not for Redistribution File Use Subject to Terms & Conditions of PDF License Agreement (PLA)