Open University ready for Law School, NYSC guidelines – VC

Vice Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu has said the institution will accept all guidelines by the Nigeria Law School and National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). President Muhammadu Buhari recently assented to the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Amendment Act which in every respect will enable graduates […]

Vice Chancellor of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Professor Abdalla Uba Adamu has said the institution will accept all guidelines by the Nigeria Law School and National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

President Muhammadu Buhari recently assented to the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Amendment Act which in every respect will enable graduates to participate in the one-year national youth service and also attend the Nigeria Law School. What is the situation now?

In December 2013, the president assented to the amendment of NOUN Act which meant NOUN is at a par with the universities act. The implication is that the old perception people had on NOUN that it operated on part-time basis or by correspondence is gone. Incidentally right from its inception in 1983, it had never been a part-time institution or offered knowledge by correspondence.

We used the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) or post offices to send study material to students. We have physical contact with the students through our study centres and we are a full-time university but the students come on a part-time basis so the part-time camera is from their angle not our angle. The instructions we provide are full-time.

But between 1983 and 2003, a new narrative entered into the educational debate in Africa and that was the Open and Distant Learning (ODL). By 2003 people have begun to realize that ODL is different from correspondence education.

Correspondence education is where you sit at home and lectures are brought to you by radio or sent to you; there is no contact with the university. In ODL, study centers are created, study materials are provided to the students in the centers and students engage with facilitators. In fact, one of our conditions for us to open a study centre anywhere, is that there must be a facility room where students can engage with a facilitator.

So, by the time ODL became part of the narrative, we made sure that our law has been amended to reflect ODL and online. With the assent, it means that, we operate like any other university.

Law School prevented our students from studying there because they were under the impression that we were a part-time institution and their rules and regulations do not allow part-time students. We are now entering into negotiations with the Law School to know what to do and we are willing to accept whatever conditions they will provide to enable our students to participate.

Our mandate is to teach students law but not to produce lawyers like the mandate of any university is to teach students engineering but not to make them engineers.

The same thing with the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC); we are trying to reach out to the NYSC to ask them the way forward. We have graduated 58,000 students since we started and if all these students are yet to do the youth service. They would overload the system but luckily, not all of them are qualified because many of them are much older than 30 years.

We are more concerned with the younger ones, who want to serve our nation, because NYSC currently gives exemption certificates to our students which many employers accept.  We are willing to accept, whatever conditions NYSC would provide.

Most of the northern states are said to be lagging behind in ODL. Is there any improvement?

Unfortunately, the situation is more or less the same; there is only a slight improvement. If you pick up all the northern states and take the number of students they have in 2019, they are not up to the number of students in South-West alone. So, the total number of students from the South-West is more than the number of students from the entire northern states.

Part of the reason is first, lack of awareness on what NOUN is all about but with the movement of the headquarters of the university from Lagos to Abuja, and with greater advocacy by northern study centre directors, we are getting more students. And by January next year we are hoping to start a number of programmes that would attract a lot of people from the North.

We are also going to establish a study centre in Niamey, Niger Republic, and they have told us they are interested in Mass Communication, Arabic and Hausa languages. Again we are going to reach out to other West African states.

How do you source and share course materials and why did you set up a printing press?

We used to outsource the printing of study materials and our students engaged the curriculum through the study materials but we don’t run classes. A lot of the materials are printed in excess and because of the dynamic nature of our students, we don’t even know the number of students that could register for a particular course, this is because of the flexibility of the system; you can start a course and simply drop out. Our system would show for example, you are registered for Economics 101, and when we come to print the study materials we would capture you even if you decided to stop.

Printers tell us they can only print a minimum of a given number of copies and if I have a class of 20 or 30 students and I print 1,000 copies, I would be left with a lot of waste and this is what we have in all the study centers; huge amount of materials that are no longer useful either because they are obsolete or are in excess production.

When I came on board we discovered that for a fraction of the cost of producing study materials, we can have our printing press with all the equipment and even the staff. And now we can print study material on demand which means even if we have 15 students, we only print 15 and that saves us a lot of money but if the course has 10,000 students like general studies, we have the machines that could produce that number too. It is easier for us to have access to the study materials.

So, we upload all our study materials on the internet and this is why a lot of our colleagues and students from many institutions download and use our materials and we don’t mind. Recently, we received a request from the Open University of Zimbabwe, for our study materials in all our courses and we put them on DVD and sent to them. So we share course materials. Modibbo Adama University also uses our materials.