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| Professor Vincent Ado Tenebe |
Many Nigerians are not aware of a university called National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). How have you performed for the past two years you have been vice chancellor of the institution?
When I came into office as the Vice Chancellor of NOUN, I met a lot of challenges and I knew from the very beginning that it will not be possible to solve all the problems. But I decided to focus on the key problems to ensure that the university gains the confidence of the people. Before I came in, even getting admission into the university was a big problem.
We were faced with complaints from people buying forms and not getting admission; including people trying to indulge in some scam to get people admitted. So the first thing I did was to make sure that the admission was electronic.
As I speak to you, you can walk into any of our four banks and purchase NOUN form. You will be given a pin code and then you can go to the internet and fill in your data and get your admission, so that solves a lot of problems.
There was also the problem of students who said they had been in the system for long without writing any examination. Some people spend two to three years without writing any examination. When I came in, I made sure that we put a system in place, to the extent that we are now writing examinations regularly and the results are released without delay. We introduced the e-exam, whereby you can write your exam online and get the result immediately. The system will ask you whether you want to retake the paper if you couldn't make it. We had the challenges of perception from some people who were saying that our programmes were not accredited and not recognised.
Some didn't even believe that we are an existing university. That was because for the almost eight years that the university was in existence before I came in, there was no accreditation by the National Universities Commission (NUC). I made sure I prepared the university for accreditation. Last year, 30 out of our 31 programmes were accredited. We are working towards ensuring that the one programme that was not accredited is accredited. With the accreditation of our programmes, nobody should doubt whether we are doing the real thing or not.
Nigeria is blessed with high population and there is no how we can educate the whole of this population using conventional system. We don't have the materials and human resources to do that, but using the Open and Distance Learning which is the mode through which we operate, Nigeria would be able to accomplish this. This is because it has been proven in countries like China, India, UK and Indonesia, that are highly populated; this system is working.
How do you get funds to operate?
Bringing in finance as one of the challenges to problems is now old fashioned in the sense that I can tell you that finance is not the problem of Nigeria. Whether we like it or not, we have a lot of money in this country. Whether we like it or not, this country is rich compared to our neighbours. The problem with us is the management. How do we allocate this finance?
How do we prioritise the use of this finance? So, definitely I have the problem of finance, but I did not go singing the problem of finance as the first problem because even if the federal government gives half of its budget to NOUN, we will still be in problem just like the whole country is in problem because we have not prioritised our finances.The question is what do you do with the meagre one you have? But honestly, if the government is able to finance education generally, we will have fewer problems because unless we solve the educational problems of this country, other problems will not be solved.
Most parents and even the younger people find NOUN unattractive and prefer to go to conventional universities where admission is often very difficult. Why is this so?
It is because of ignorance. You know to accept change is difficult. This is a new system that is coming and you don't expect the younger generation and even the older ones who are not used to Open and Distance Learning to grab it. To them, unless a student gets admission, goes to live in the hostel, goes to the classroom and all those routines, they will not believe they are students. But very soon, this will be the reverse just like it is in India and China. This is a system that will allow the young ones to come to the university full time like any other conventional university. Because we are flexible, we enable them to go out there and look for some means of sustaining themselves.
More than half of Nigeria's population is not in school, not because they don't have the qualification, but it is because they don't have the financial support. We have a lot of brilliant people whose parents are poor and cannot sponsor them to the university. So even if you have the admission and you don't have sponsorship, you will sit at home. But the open university system gives admission to you and we allow you to keep working and we even teach you how to work better without losing the quality in education. That is why in the UK, China and India, you will see young men and women go for open university. Even if you give them admission in the conventional university, they will reject it because nobody can sustain them there as they have to be studying and fending for themselves.
In our system, there is nothing like 75 per cent of class attendance before you sit for exams. That is the requirement in the conventional system, whether you are in the polytechnic or university or college of education. Here is a system that even if you have zero per cent attendance, you can write your examination.
In the international world, the young men and women are after freedom, they don't want anything that can affect their decision. This is the new thing that the open university is bringing in and that is the change. This is a system that is democratising education, giving freedom and the world is going democratic now. So we democratise and demystify education. That is why with time, Nigerian youths will prefer the Open University system to the conventional system.Have those you graduated been mobilised for the NYSC?
That is another challenge that we are fighting now. The NYSC Act and the laws that governs it, prescribes that if you are 30 and below, you go for NYSC. If you are above 30, you get an exemption letter. We are a special university, our case is peculiar.
But we are also mindful of the youths who are coming fresh and that is why we have now reached an agreement with the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). The board has made it mandatory for us to pay for every graduate that is the age of participating in NYSC so that they can send it to NYSC. We have just done that, so all our graduates who are below the age of 30 will key into the NYSC system.
I will also use this forum to tell the federal government that you do not deprive any graduate of open university who is supposed to go for NYSC because if you do that you will be discouraging the youths from coming into the system. If you discourage them from coming to the open university, you don't have space for them in the conventional universities. If you don't allow them to go to the conventional universities, you are building up a population of illiterates. When you build a population of illiterates, you build up crises in your society and then you have a time bomb.
What is the carrying capacity of the Open University at the moment?
That is another interesting aspect of our university. We are limitless, that is why we are called open. Our capacity is at infinity. Open universities today can accommodate 5 million, 10 million students. As many as are interested in acquiring education, we have room for them. We are opened as wide as the capacity of this country. As I speak to you, the open university of India has a student population of 3.8 million. At the moment we are already at the capacity of 132,000 students. I want to assure you that in the next two sessions, we want to hit 500,000 students. My dream for the open university is that in the next five years, we should have at least 1.5 million students. So there is no carrying capacity. This is the only university that has the mandate to admit as many students as possible because we have the technology to accommodate the academic needs of these students. Open University is a peculiar and special university, designed to do this without undermining quality.
How many prominent Nigerians have graduated from the Open University?
In our last convocation, we convoked 7,222 students. I don't have the statistics of earlier graduates before now.
We don't want to focus on prominent Nigerians alone because people may think it is a political university. We are more concerned about those in the rural areas; we are more concerned about those boys and girls in the streets. I have just told you that I have seven vice chancellors from other universities including myself as students of NOUN. I am a student of Post Graduate Diploma in Education. I have the Vice Chancellor of Berita University who is a student of Law; I have the Vice Chancellor of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, who is also a student of Law. I can tell you so many prominent Nigerians who are students of our university. The Awujale of Ijebu, somebody who is 78 years old and has been on the throne for 52 years, is a student of 100 level Law in NOUN. The more than 22 Obas under his domain have also enrolled in NOUN just because the Awujale, the paramount ruler of Ijebu land enrolled.
The Emir of Bauchi has just filled in his form for admission......not long ago, the Commissioner of Finance, Nasarawa State, Prof. Mainoma a former Deputy Vice Chancellor of Nasarawa State University called me while I was at a meeting in far away Dubai to complain that he filled the form online to study Law, but he was not given admission and wanted me to help him. He said the system denied him admission. I asked him whether he has credit in literature in English and he said he did not take literature and I told him that he cannot get that admission and advised him to go and register for literature if he wants. Even myself when I tried to register for Law because I am a professor of Law, but I never studied literature, the system denied me.
How do you tackle exam malpractice since everything is open at the university?
Yes, everything is open and like I told you, when you give freedom to human beings, you will reduce the tension. If I had said before you came here, put on your suit, you will ask why is this man thinking this way? But if I give you the freedom, you will dress well and will not even think in that direction. In open university, we are flexible. This is the university in Nigeria that has the least exam malpractice and let me tell you why. In our e-examination, if all of us here are taking the same course, during examination, you can be sitting next to another man writing the same course, we have programmed it in such away that if your Question 1 answer is "A", the same number at the other man's question will not be "A". It could be D or E and if he thinks he will be asking you what is the answer and you keep telling him, you are going to pass and he will fail.
What about the postgraduate students that take their examinations using pen and paper?
I am coming to that. We are not a direct teaching university. As I am sitting here, some of you could be my course mates I don't know. Because as students, you don't know your lecturer or someone who is marking your paper. How are you going to lobby; how can a lecturer victimise a student because he is wooing the same girl with him as it happens in conventional universities. I started as a graduate assistant in Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, then Federal University of Technology, Bauchi, and I moved to the rank of a professor in a period of 23 years. I will be 30 years in academics by October this year. I can tell you, out of these 30 years, I spent 23 in the conventional university system. We are human beings. In the conventional system, a lecturer can fail you because you are chasing the same girl with him or a lecturer can fail you just because somebody reported you to him. Or you had a clash somewhere or he or she had known your father or mother somewhere. In open university, you cannot experience victimisation because the system we operate, the people who are marking the pen and paper examination don't know the candidates. We pack our papers from Kaduna and take them down South. I will not tell you where because some of you could be students and unless you tell me now I won't know.
That is the open university system because we operate fully on marking scheme. Even with the marking scheme, we don't just take our results like that, we have examiners that will ensure that you remove the human error while marking and so we standardise the result. In fact if not that NUC insisted that we must have pen to paper exams, the e-exams is more difficult. But in the pen to paper exams, there is no way you won't get some marks even if you are beating around the bush you will hit some points and pass. But the e-exams, after you finish, it gives you the total result instantly. But during the accreditation, the NUC returned us back to pen and paper exams. What we have done is to ensure that 100 to 200 level students write the e-exams while 300 level upwards write pen to paper.
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