Prof Abdallah Uba Adamu, immediate past Vice Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), in this interview, spoke on how he addressed certain issues to stabilise the system when he steered the affairs of the varsity for five years.
As the VC of NOUN for about five years now, what would you say you are most proud of in the institution?
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I don’t want to go into individual details but let’s look at four areas. When I was appointed as the VC of the university, there were four things that struck me; and even before I came to the university, people were calling and indicating areas that needed to be sorted out. I sat down for about a week and itemized them. Number one was the issue of missing results. People graduated but even after a long time their convocation was not held and their results were missing. Number two was NYSC after graduation, and Number three was Law School admission. Students graduated from here but were not admitted into the Law school. Number four dealt with data management; what kind of data we had and how could we manage them.
I looked at the missing results issue and discovered that the entire data management structure of the university was outsourced to two companies – Cyberspace and Imaging Platform. Cyberspace was responsible for examination administration and Imaging Platform for the electronics facilities. Both companies were based in Lagos; then the university was in Lagos and nobody had control over them.
I asked if we had a department of Computer Science and I learnt there was and there were professors there. So I directed the Computer Science Department to take over that function and we appointed Dr. Mukhtar Alhassan and plenty other geniuses to come up with solution. Meantime, we disengaged from the vendors and created our homegrown portal and started processing our results.
Now if you look at the pattern of the graduation of students from 2017 to 2021 it peaked and then went down because we have been able to weed out all those that were stagnant in the system. So we sorted that out and we created stability in the system.
Then, the NYSC has never said it would not accept students of NOUN, there was just a lot of misconception. NYSC releases and issues three certificates – the Participatory, the Exemption and Exclusion certificates – ours is the Exemption certificate. We are exempted because they said you don’t have to do NYSC if you are under special education and the ODL is considered special education.
The moment you graduate you are given a letter that tells you to go to a particular website and download your Exemption certificate.
The third issue required an amendment to the Act. When they wrote the bill establishing the university in 1983 they included terms like ‘correspondent’ and ‘part-time’ which at that time was okay because it reflected the standard best practices for this kind of education but the Law school said it will no longer take students who studied via part-time. So it automatically categorized NOUN as a part-time institution. They have a basis as the law actually mentioned part-time but that is because people don’t understand what ODL means (Open and Distance Learning).
So what we did was to see that the law is amended and to reflect current practices in online delivery. It took a lot of effort but eventually, we were able to get the law amended in 2018. We immediately gazetted this and we wrote a letter to the Council for Legal Education and on January 15, 2021, they responded saying our students can now go to Law school.
These four things are what primed my administration. They are what you can call revolutionary stages of the university but then there are evolutionary changes which are stages of development just like a baby which has to grow.
The most important part for us is moving from Lagos to Abuja with the greatest support from TETFund and we have been able to create other structures and one of the things we are very proud of is the Directorate of Learning, Content and Management System, the only of its kind in African institutions.
What we are now working on is improving the quality of our products. We are aware that there are some challenges when you study on your own; so we are trying to improve on the quality of our product.
We are also happy that we have motivated politicians to use their constituency projects to set up study centres in their constituencies.
There has been concerns over the alleged use of ‘mercenaries’ by students to write assignments and exams. How were you able to tackle that?
It happens in every university. We have face recognition software that enables us to determine whether you are the person that you say you are or not. As students line up to go into the examination hall, the camera is on them and it matches the face on the database in our system. That does not mean it was foolproof; some might have escaped. So it’s a perpetual challenge. One thing we tried but could not sustain was remote examination.
During the lockdown, we came up with the idea that people would be examined where they were but we had a condition; you must have one gigabyte of data, solid internet, and must be alone, no phones and no one close by. You will be surprised at the number of people we caught cheating because they thought nobody would see them. We used AI software to detect the presence of people around. So if somebody is pressing the monitor, another person is behind the monitor trying to answer the questions, the software detects that. We got many students and we felt we needed to perfect the system.
Briefly tell us some of the challenges you encountered?
Among challenges we faced were first, the misconception of what the university is all about. People tended to think that it was not a real university and the reason being that people are used to being taught in the formal classroom structure. Now however you are on your own; if you pass it is because you worked very hard and if you don’t it means you didn’t work hard.
Another challenge is accountability. People are not accountable, it is the same with every other organization where people tend to take advantage of a flexible situation. But since God is in control, those challenges are under control.
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