TETFund enlists support of varsity registrars in revolutionizing academic system
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has enlisted the support of university registrars toward ensuring that it’s Tertiary Education Research and Application Systems (TERAS), a digital learning platform, is used across board in the university system.
The Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arch. Sonny Echono, who sought the support while speaking at the second Registrar’s Workshop and 75th Business Meeting held recently at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Abuja, said there is need to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative, research and other purposes by students and staff of their institutions.
TERAS comprises IT infrastructure and services offering computing, storage and networking to participating institutions and meant to support the publication and learning needs of students through institutional libraries.
Echono acknowledged the critical roles played by registrars in the Nigerian university system, saying, “Registrars are the first contact of our Senate, when they give admission, and they are also the last contacts as they play the roles of monitoring and supervising.
While noting that the platform is not only for students, he said that registrars of tertiary institutions play a very key role because they are also the custodians of records, adding that the fund has been engaging with them to ensure maximum utilisation of the ICT infrastructure for administrative purposes.
On the theme, “Sustainable Legal Framework as Panacea for Industrial Harmony in the Nigerian University System: Challenges and Remedies,” he said, “This is so important because His Excellency, Mr President, accords high priority in our academic calendar to see how our education system can work seamlessly and also with proper efficiently.”
He said: “TERAS, is now revolutionising our academic system by putting in place so many resources for our students and scholars to make them globally competitive. We enlist the support of the registrars to ensure that TERAS is used across board. So we look forward to the recommendation that we will get from the engagement.”
Echono said he is proud of their honest contributions towards the delivery of quality higher education in the country and assured that this year, through major interventions as part of their ICT roadmap, the fund will be connecting the study centres of the NOUN to improve access to resources by all students.
Speaking further on TERAS, Echono explained that there are advantages for students and scholars to enrol on the platform as they will have access to various materials that will help them in their research and studies.
He said: “I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend it to private universities because they are also Nigerian students, but we want to give them the opportunity first to finish onboarding their students.”
The TETFund boss disclosed that currently, they have about 2.5 million students enrolled but that his biggest concern, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability, or that people are enrolled, “we are interested in the usage, how many students are using all these facilities?”
He said: “We put resources on the platform so at the moment it has an overlay of an identity management system, we call it beneficiary identity management, BIMS, and once you are registered on BIMS it gives you access at no cost to all these learning resources, whether it is all the 4,000 libraries that are available.”
“The open learning resources, whether it’s the anti-plagiarism checker that will enable you to check your assignments and your thesis and all that, they are all on this board, and the Blackboard learning platform is very useful for our registrars too in terms of administration and the governance of the institutions,” he said.
While pointing out the importance of data in the school system, Echono stated that data has however been a big issue in Nigeria’s educational system as even in the tertiary institutions, the country has not been able to do a lot about it but that has been prioritised by the present administration.
“Our educational data should be credible; it should be up-to-date and it should be available in a ubiquitous manner for people to be able to access because you can’t plan effectively if you don’t have credible, accurate data. And that data is being dumped through ICT; so, we are working with registrars to ensure that,” he said.
Explaining how it works, he said “If you just click, by the time you go on to our BIMS for example, you see a student’s record, everything about that student will pop up and you will know when he was enrolled, and what course he is doing in the school; such records we must have for effective national planning.”
He also stated that a lot of lecturers are utilising it already because in real time from their office, they can see how many students are on it at a particular point in time, and how many lecturers are using it for lesson notes. It makes education a lot easier.
Earlier, the National Chairman of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities, ARNU, Ife Oluwale, said the workshop was to help registrars of universities hone their skills and be abreast with current trends in university administration globally.
Oluwale said the association is committed to the capacity development of its members and believes that a trained staff is an invaluable asset to any organization.