The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) was established in 2002 with the vision of catering to a section of the populace desirous of tertiary education outside of the confines of the regular university system.
Previously, the institution, in furtherance of its mandate as the flagship tertiary institution for open and distance learning in Nigeria, utilised a harmonised learning management portal called iLEARN that allows for online instructional delivery through the combination of audio, video and text mediums.
The iLEARN project, for example, catered to prison inmates, particularly at the Kirikiri Maximum Prisons, ensuring that they locally have access to study materials, audio-visual resources, and past questions, and updating same, monthly as updated on the iLEARN portal. This intervention no longer exists at the institution. It is now in digital darkness.
Graduating students of NOUN had always enjoyed the benefits of carrying out their clearance virtually through a customised platform developed for the school by iLearn to aid the clearance process.
But those who participated in the just-concluded convocation had to travel from their respective destinations to the headquarters of the university in Abuja.
This task has not only become tedious and time-consuming, some of the graduating students have not been cleared even though they presented themselves for clearance.
This is due to their inability to download their receipts from the previous portal and the institution has not made it any easier by providing alternatives, hence, they cannot collect their certificates.
In the same vein, the institution now has no access to accurate data. It is unable to determine the number of enrollment per semester or determine the accurate number of active students or registered students in the institution. This makes it impossible to determine the institution’s revenue.
Examination registration could not be conducted in most parts of the country due to the lack of a portal, while the institution has recorded a failed attempt to use the manual registration and paper exam to replace the e-exam.
Payment of tuition fees has not been easy. The unavailability of internet services at the school study centres makes staff to incur data expenses from their pockets for official assignments.
Saka Mahmood
Abuja.
and then