Marketisation of Ghanaian higher academic institutions: a hypermodal analysis of universities’ homepages

Abstract

The marketization of higher education continues to incite universities towards the adoption of vital promotional practices. As a result, the university homepage has gained much interest from scholars and researchers from various backgrounds, including discourse analysts. However, the bulk of the literature focuses on homepages of universities in Anglo-American and Asian-Pacific contexts, whereas research of African and, particularly, Ghanaian universities’ homepages remains scant. In addressing this gap, the present study investigated how selected Ghanaian universities project their corporate identities (CIs) to promote their products and services through the hypermodal resources (images, verbal resources, and navigational elements) on their institutional homepages by drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar model, and Zhang and O’Halloran’s (2012) hypermodal framework. The findings reveal that although Ghanaian universities portray their space as an intense academic environment, they tend to emphasize human resources rather than the existence of structural resources or facilities in representing their identities. In addition, the discoverability of information on the homepages was found to be low, with no overlaps between information sub-categories. The study, therefore, contributes to the scholarship on the marketization of higher education and has practical implications for the design of universities’ homepages in Ghana and other jurisdictions. Recommendations for further research are offered