The Director, University of Ibadan Distance Learning Centre (DLC), Professor Bayo Okunade, in an interview with select journalists, spoke on the activities of the centre, the worth of UI DLC certificate and the plan by the centre to establish foreign centres, Tunde Ogunesan was there. His report.IN 2011, 1,493,604 candidates sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculations Examination (UTME) to vie for 500,000 admission slots in Nigerian universities. The effect of this was that many of them lost out in their bid to be matriculated in any university. This development has accounted for the rise in the number of applicants for the distance learning programme of the University of Ibadan. However,the executive director of the centre, Professor Bayo Okunade, has stressed that the centre is not a dumping ground for prospective candidates seeking admission into the university."We don't want anybody to be pushed to take the distance learning programme. We want people to make a choice. During the admission exercise, we were under pressure to admit students who could not be admitted to the regular programmes but we stood our ground and said that anybody who wished to come for the distance learning programme should show interest. We don't want the DLC to be turned into a dumping ground," Okunade said.In justifying the reasons the centre rejected the overtures from the main university, Professor Okunade said that the move was dingy and showed that the centre had a primary function with a peculiar mandate. He said, "the UI DLC has a mandate to provide opportunities and access to tertiary education in Nigeria and beyond. Our mission has national and global dimensions and by the side, we're not supposed to be providers of cross-border education in Nigeria alone, but we find out that most of our activities are limited to the South-West in Nigeria and given the new dispensation, where we're going to deploy known IT infrastructure to aid our work."We have two general agenda, one; to expand our coverage in Nigeria so that we don't concentrate essentially in the southern part of south western Nigeria and two, we want to go past the border of Nigeria. Now, we have two partners outside Nigeria, but, currently, our partnership with an institution in Ghana is our priority. Of course, we have gone to do the assessment of the infrastructure and a lot of effort has gone into legal requirement in Ghana. At this juncture, I will say that what we need to do is to tidy up what has been on ground and get the necessary approval from the board of the DLC of the university. I think we are in a better position now, our students buy and complete their forms online. All payments, registration and the whole issue of identity cards are done online, so our students don't necessarily have to come to do anything at the centre. That means our students can be anywhere in the world; that's the benefit of Distance Learning Education."Furthermore, Professor Okunade disclosed that despite people's disposition to learning in Nigeria, the centre, which he disclosed is in its 23rd year in Nigeria, is not resting on its oars to be able to compete favourably with its counterparts around the globe. He said that while Nigerians still had doubts about distance learning, in the developed world, when students finished their 'A' levels, they would make a choice about whether they want to proceed to regular or distance learning while working. According to him, this condition does not make their certificates inferior to regular students, because it is only in Nigeria that the thought of such comes into discussion.Then, what is the institution or the centre doing to correct this impression' Professor Okunade hinted that information technology had changed the face of education throughout the world, saying that was what would be employed for the centre's facelift.According to him, the centre is working on an arrangement where its students could be taught anywhere in the world via the internet. Okunade said, "Today, we're talking about a virtual university just like the virtual library where you can take your mobile phones and access information from all over the world. That is the trend now, it's a global trend and reality in tertiary education."Now, the only thing that we're working towards is how we can do exams without coming to the centre, and that's a worldwide challenge. In terms of every other thing, what we do here has been decentralised. Now, we have interactive sessions regularly so that the students can interact with the course lecturers. In the past, all our students were coming to Ibadan, but this time around, they don't need to do that again."What we're now doing is that we're creating more administrative centres. We're trying to decentralise, to make sure that our students, wherever they are, have the benefit of distance learning education. But we have factored in the issue of cost effectiveness, and that is where we're going to get great interactive sessions for the exam."In a situation where you have large number of students coming for the exam, instead of them coming to Ibadan, we can now do many things within the same time. The interactive session will be shorter, the exam period also will be shorter.
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