INTERVIEW

 

Professor Bode Asubiojo, the director of the Centre for Distance Learning at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, spoke with Abdul-Hameed Oyegbade about online education.

 

What informs the idea of online distance learning introduced by OAU?

Distance learning is the form of education whereby we take education to the students, instead of the students coming to the campus and meet the lecturers. This form of education is spreading because it is evident that the conventional university system cannot adequately provide for the need of so many students that intend to get university education. For example, in Nigeria, on the average, 1.8 million prospective undergraduates apply for university education, every year, and usually about four hundred of them succeed in getting the admission. Out of these 1.8 million applicants for university admission, 1.5 students have the requisite qualification. But they could not be admitted because of lack of adequate facilities in the universities. Then, there is another group of candidates who would want to get university education but they are the working class who would not want to leave their jobs. For this set of working class students, the distance learning is very useful. Many top Nigerians, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief Afe Babalola, received this type of university education. Some elders in Nigeria would remember the correspondence courses whereby you stay in Nigeria and you would be receiving your lectures by post from England. But with technology now, there are electronic forms of delivering lectures to the students, without necessarily being present in the class room, and that is what we are doing. With this concept, we intend to reach out to as many people who want university education.

 

Where did you borrow the concept from?

Some universities in the advanced countries have been doing online distance learning but OAU is the first to do it in Nigeria. We packaged it in a way that it can fit into the Nigeria system. We adopt the modified form of the one in Michigan's Virtual University (USA).

 

How is the programme packaged?

The OAU online education is the first of its kind in Nigeria. The same lecturers that teach the courses in the classrooms also teach our online students. A lecturer would enter the studio and deliver his lecture. We have standard studios. The lecture would be video recorded and send to our online to student. The student can play it back as many times as he likes. The computer tablet has internet connection and the students can also interact with the lecturers and access materials from the library.

 

Is the programme covering courses such as medicine and law which seem to be difficult to run online?

Honestly, there is nothing about law that we cannot do online. Law is simple to do by online distance learning. I agree that medicine may be hard to do online because of the issue of laboratories. But with the way technology is going now, experiments are performed in the moon from the earth. I'm a professor of chemistry and in conjunction with Professor L.O. Kehinde of Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering we have developed three chemistry experiments that can be performed online. So, there is nothing insurmountable in it. But to answer your question, we have not introduced the real science courses. 

 

We are starting with just three courses in the arts and social sciences at undergraduate level and these include bachelor of nursing, education, accounting and economics and we will soon expand. We are planning to do some post-graduate courses.

 

How are the lectures delivered to students?

There is the asynchronous in which the lecture would have been prepared for the students. We have facility to do the synchronous mode. It is a matter of informing the online students to hook on at a particular time. We have telepresence in OAU and we can do both synchronous and asynchronous.

 

What about test and examination?

For now, the online students would have to come to our campus to write their exams while those far away would write their exams in our resource centres in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. This type of education imposes a lot of responsibility on the lecturers, given the way the question for tests and assignments would be designed. It is open book tests that even when you open your book because your lecturer is not seeing you, you would not find the answers.

 

By Abdul-Hameed Oyegbade

Dailytrust