Establish Media and Communication Studies Dept in OAU, don tells management

A senior lecturer in the Department of English Language, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Professor Rotimi Taiwo, has called for the establishment of a Department of Media and Communication Studies in the university.

Professor Taiwo made the recommendation on Tuesday, while delivering the university’s 319^th inaugural lecture entitled Beyond the Text: Critical Discourse Analysis and the Quest for Meaning in Cyberspace Interaction, at the Oduduwa Hall of the institution.

He said the creation of such a department would lighten the burden on the Department of English of the university which he described as the largest in any university in the country in terms of students’ enrolment.

“The fact that a good number of our graduates end up becoming successful media practitioners is an indication of their keen interest in media and communication.

“While language is the tool for communicating in cyberspace, the essential practices of communication and the media are equally vital to success in any interaction.

“I strongly believe that the establishment of a Department of Media and Communication Studies is long overdue in this university. Ours is the only first generation university that does not have such department.

“The department, when established, will complement the work of Department of English and reduce the pressure for admission into English. English is the most desired course in the Faculty of Arts. Most students who could not be admitted to study Law, the natural first course of choice for Arts students, end up in the Department of English.

The Professor, who has 83 publications to his credit, also called for a blend of e-learning technique with the traditional classroom approach by further exploring the potential that technology offers.

“While we must give credit to this university for pioneering the use of ICT in teaching and research in Nigeria, we will need to catch up with new developments, especially with the growth in our students’ population over the years.

“I am sure a number of us (students and lecturers) are sometimes overwhelmed with our large classes and the limited spaces available. The traditional face-to-face teaching should be replaced with blended learning, which is a combination of e-learning with the traditional classroom methods in order to create a new hybrid methodology.

“This method will support classroom interactions with digital multimodal assets through the various social media platforms…

“The reality of our time is that the skills that are valued in education in the highly dynamic world we live in today, as opposed to a few decades ago, require students to be able to collaborate with others and explore their world in order to create, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate information. The traditional classroom alone can no longer take care of such skills,” he said.