No fewer than 22,175 students are expected to graduate as the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) gets set to hold its 13th convocation ceremony.
Speaking at the pre-convocation press conference in Abuja on Monday, the Vice Chancellor, NOUN, Professor, Vincent Ado Tenebe disclosed that the total graduands in the coming convocation is 22,175 which includes 15,768 undergraduate students, and 6,407 post-graduate students among others.
Professor Tenebe revealed that among this year’s graduands, 22 bagged first class just as 8,427 made second class lower .There are 6 PhD holders among others.
He disclosed that NOUN has grown its study center from 17 which it started with in 2003 to 120 among other notable achievements.
The VC also revealed that the university will honour two prominent Nigerians with honourary doctorate degrees, He also hinted that the Oba of Benin will be confered with an honourary doctorate degree, among others.
He said,”We are here to give you an update about what is going to happen in the university this week. As you are aware, one of the main functions of any university is to chun out graduates who have been found worthy both in character and in learning. And this week from Thursday is an occasion of such. This is going to be our 13th convocation ceremony since we are resuscitated.
“The programmes for the activities for the ceremony is actually starting right now. One of the first activities is to meet with you, our friends from the press,and to tell you what we have been doing for the past year.
“We will start on Thursday. We will have many activities to do this year quite unlike other convocation ceremonies that we have held. On the First day, we shall be out to honour, to confer honour to our new Chancellor, His Royal Majesty Oba Ewuare the 2nd, the Oba of Benin Kingdom. He is our Chancellor designate. On Thursday we will confer him with the doctorate degree,and install him as the Chancellor.
“We seize this opportunity to appreciate the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, His Excellency Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, for finding him, His Royal Majesty worthy to be appointed as the Chancellor of the largest (university) in Nigeria, and indeed the sub-saharan Africa.
“On Friday we are going to have the convocation lecture, and to demonstrate that we belong to a family of open and distance learners practitioners, we have invited once again the Vice Chancellor, Open University of Tanzania, Professor Elifas Tozo Bisanda, he is to be the convocation lecturer and his topic will be “Is Western Education Still Relevant For Africa”. We are hoping through the lecture Prof. Bisanda will be able to direct us to one of the areas which might be of use to us as a country, as well as the African continent.
“On Saturday, we are having the usual convocation ceremony. This year is a little bit different,we are going to have two eminent Nigerians be confered with the honorary degree of the doctorate of our great university. The first one of them is Dr Innocent Chukwuma, CON, we will confer on him the “Doctor of Business Administration” and the second person is Hajia Hafsatu Abdulwaheed.
“Dr Chukwuma is well known to many of us now.He is a prominent Nigerin entrepreneur, and he is the founder and chief executive officer of Innoson Motors, one of Nigeria’s leading automobile manufacturing company.His creativity, his innovation, his commitment to local content is one of the reasons this university has considered it fit to honour him. The second person is Hajia Hafsatu Abdulwaheed. She is an eminent activist yet very motherly. Hajia Hafsatu Abdulwaheed has dedicated her life for promoting education particularly for girls within her sphere of domicile. And she (uses) the transformative power of literacy to uplift communities and break the cycle of poverty. The last time we had honourary degree in this university was 2015, so it is not something we do often.It is something we do after very careful consideration. These two awardees reflect the core values of the National Open University of Nigeria which is “Entrepreneur Ingenuity and Knowledge Base Content Creativity”. And we are very glad that when invited they accepted to be confered with such honours from this university. And rather than reap off from them, we thought we are gaining from their membership of the academic community of the National Open University.
“On Saturday proper, the Chancellor now having been installed as the Chancellor, will confer degrees to various categories that we have, undergraduates, masters and post-graduates. This year, I am proud to announce that the total graduands we have is 22,175 students across Nigerian campus graduate levels of diverse discipline. Of this number 15,768 are for undergraduate degrees, while 6,407 are for post-graduate degrees. The analysis of the data representing the graduates will be presented fully in my report when I address the convocation. But just to paraphrase, all the faculties have representation of the under-graduates in the university with the faculty of social sciences having the largest number of graduands.
“Out of these undergraduates, we have 22 of them as first class, about 1886 as second class upper and 8427 students as second class lower, about 3782 of 3rd class, we also have a few pass degrees which is quit normal. Fir the post-graduates, we have post graduate diplomas in various fields, they are: Agriculture, Arts, Education, Management Sciences, Social Sciences, totalling 2,362, and for Masters we have about 4,039 students will be graduating with Masters degrees at various faculties. Am happy this year to report that you have about six (6) PhD graduates which is an indication that the university is gradually moving towards establishing the one we call the first post-graduate school, that is where the dean of postgraduate school will stay. We are extremely gladdened that this year are producing six PhD graduates.”
He added,”Now for us as a university, we may need to inform you that with the increasing number of graduates we have, the question is how do we cope with managing them and delivering lecture. And one of the profound development that has happened to us in the university is that we are growing our study centers from 17 when we started in 2003 and to about 120 now spread across all over the country.
“And indeed part of our challenge has been that we have had many notable Nigerians, community leaders and communities putting pressure on us to establish study centers for them in their respective places. And the NOUN has now assumed and undoubtedly a university of first choice for those who are unable to go to the contact universities. We have been able to surmount those challenges of little subscription, culture of requesting or the geography wherever that person is staying, and we are able to do that through maximum deployment of technology. I think in the whole West Africa, East Africa, and perhaps some parts of North Africa, no university has deployed technology the way have deployed. Indeed we are known to that effect that even the National University Commission (NUC) we support, we provide the entire ICT infrastructure for the capacity building that NUC does every year for the past few years.
“Not just the ICT infrastructure, we also supply the personnel. So, our university has taken extremely long strides, in the manner and way which it has delivered it’s lectures.And we have one unit of powers that is extremely so important to that, as one of the directors of its learning content management system spareheaded the delivery of technology, and to the extent that right now our academics all over the faculties and departments, almost all our courses now have video component, in order to assist our students not just to have physical content but also to have electronic content,and we deploy this with ease.
“I want to say here that because of the manner the country has seen the way we deploy technology, TETfund has been so magnanimous to us that it has offered to assist us with fibre optic to all our study centers across the country. It is a testimony to who we are in terms of technology. And that is not the only thing. The fact that federal government licensed four new open universities that are private shows that we have able to bring credibility to open and distance learning. If we had not been very successful I doubt if the federal government would have had the temerity or the urge to be able to established private open universities. It shows the success and we are quit glad to that.
“We also got support from oversees countries who has also open universities. And we are bringing the example of the open university of Zambia with the Vice Chancellor that is scheduled to deliver our convocation lecture. You probably are not aware that when that university was established at about 15 years ago, we are the one that midwifed the open university of Tanzania in terms of almost all their questions, they came here and we put them through the rudiments of open university.”
The VC mentioned that university has a wide range of collaborations with universities abroad.
“We also have mentors, the Open University UK was our mentor, the Open University of Hong Kong, and currently we have quit a wide range of collaborations with universities abroad. We are a member of the African Council of Distance Learning Education. It is part of our contribution within the African continent that the National Open University of Nigeria was even elected first vice president in a recent meeting that was held last in Kenya. We have to beat our chest m, and to congratulate ourselves for a week like this, for a convocation like this as the number of graduands increases we are meeting the objectives for which the federal government has established us.
“We are in every nuks and cranny, we are in prison inmates, we are all over the country, and there is so much pressure on the university management to establish study centers in almost all the local government in this country. It is a testimony to how we have able to take the academics to term,” he said.
Speaking on the strides and achievements of the university in the past one year, he said that the institution has recorded more study centers across the country, as well as the establishment of many directorates within their campuses.
According to him, the university has so many projects that have been completed and so many projects that are ongoing, adding that the university has witnessed unprecedented growth within the past one year, and many more.
Earlier in his welcome remark, the NOUN Director of Media and Publicity, Mallam Ibrahim Sheme showered encomiums on the press for their massive support to the university.
“This is another time when we come together to review what the convocation entails. This is the 13th convocation of the series of annual events that holds every year in this university.
“My friends in the media have come as a mark of their support for us in the directorate of media and publicity.We are very grateful of the work that they do for us. We can always count on them, we know they have our back whenever we need them. They are very very willing to support us. They are very willing to publish or broadcast us, for that we are very grateful to them.
“They are true friends of the university. Their being here today is a mark of the respect they have for us,” he said.
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