MISSION STATEMENT
The NVU is a private, autonomous and multi-location
technologically and community driven institution committed to
excellence in higher education, research and service for national
development. As a catalyst of change, it provides relevant, affordable
and accessible educational and training programs that address national
needs based on principles of academic freedom, equity, transparency,
merit, versatility and accountability.
STRATEGIC VISION
In the next five years, the NVU is dedicated to fostering Nigeria's
development by producing graduates who are socially and ecologically
responsible, analytical, self-confident, assertive, disciplined,
ethical, entrepreneurial and patriotic; and who are committed to using
these skills and values to enrich Nigerian society.
INSTITUTIONAL GOALS
• To adopt ICT in increasing flexibility and extending provision of higher education in Nigeria.• To promote knowledge, skills and values needed to enhance the ability of all its students and faculty to contribute to the development needs of Nigeria.
• To make available a range of curricular offerings (with emphasis on Science and Technology) that addresses national needs.
• To develop within the University Community a culture of commitment to national issues and development.
• To establish a self-sustaining research culture to advance knowledge and to support student learning.
• To promote creativity and critical thinking among students and faculty in curriculum offerings and activities.
• To increase access to adult and continuing education programs.
• To catalyse the promotion of affordable, qualitative and accessible education in Nigeria
The NVU is being developed for all Nigerians at home and in Diaspora
who have nursed the dream of witnessing an intelligent Nigeria society.
On the DFLP, anyone can be a teacher or a student. Participation is
absolutely free. However, only students and teachers that pass the
Tertiary level Qualifying Tests (TLQT) on the DFLP are admitted into
NVU. Teachers that are admitted via the TLQT are enrolled into the
After School Hours module, where they get to own and develop their
Virtual Classrooms and create courses as guided by the DFLP course
supervisors. Teachers even have the liberty to make their classrooms
accessible with or without a fee. Students that are admitted via the
TLQT are given access into virtual classrooms, based on the Skills
Affinity Tests which directly suggests areas of key interests.
Also, the NVU shall adopt already available Open Courseware for some
of its pioneering courses. Volunteering teachers will be encouraged to
engage this courseware to create virtual classrooms on the DFLP.
The reality that issues that bother on technological evolution are better off when not procrastinated cannot be over emphasised.
With the peculiar situation in Nigeria, the vision of the NVU was conceived with a sense of urgency that incorporates a One year development plan (Phase 0) that will span over Ten years of actualization. The Ten Year actualization Period will run over three phases, a two year phase (Phase A), a Five year Phase (Phase B) and the concluding Three year phase (Phase C).
The patterns of growth of the NVU will be considered under the following growth parameters:
1. Societal Impact
2. Technical Infrastructure
3. Academic Relevance
4. Accreditation
However, growth patterns will be highlighted under two periods: the Planning stages and the actualization stages
At the Developmental Planning stages (Phase 0), NVU will start with an astounding world class Board of Trustee comprising of distinguished Nigerians at home and abroad. Nigerians in Diaspora will be invited to discuss possible solutions and they will be coerced to join in making the NVU a reality. This strategy is to make the NVU more than a Nigerian reality but make its’ studentship a diverse collection of students and there will be team projects that will ensure corporative efforts and responsibility.
Concurrently, in preparation for the take off of the University, the following projects are paramount:
At the inception of The NVU, there will be a campaign called “Educate Nigeria” which will be a front to seek solutions to the 700,000 student annual back log of students that apply for university education in Nigeria and are not admitted . The campaign will leverage on the Electronic and print media in form of Video Documentaries and Magazines and other promotional websites (like the DFLP) and serve as the much needed organ to pull empathy and interest for the project from all over the globe. The campaign will emphasise the possibilities like having Professor Oyibo teaching a NVU student Quantum Physics or Dr Emagwali teaching him Flip Flop Circuits. This will create the necessary hype for the NVU.
Also, the NVU shall adopt already available Open Courseware for some
of its pioneering courses. Volunteering teachers will be encouraged to
engage this courseware to create virtual classrooms on the DFLP.
RELEVANCE: DOES NIGERIA NEED A VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY?
The Nigerian society is highly sensitized to the great value of having a sound education. This phenomenon has caused a great demand on the already ailing educational system of the country; this is evident in the number of privately owned universities that are being established in the country. However these institutions have not even scratched the surface of the problem at all because every year Nigerian has a backlog of over 700,000 students not admitted. It seems that nothing but a system that is exponential in its growth capacity could address a phenomenon exponential in its effect as the Nigerian case as proven.
Furthermore the decadence of the Government owned universities has created a gulf that needs filling and this has caused so many foreign schools to cash in on the Nigerian huge demand for quality training .The Nigerian Educational curriculum has being left behind in a fast moving world. New courses have being developed all over the world to address issues specific to the present realities of this world. However the cost of introducing a new course in the Nigerian system is so costly coupled with the cost of re-training teachers for that purpose, thus Nigerian students are never exposed to so many new techniques used in the business world till they get out of the system .
The conventional brick and mortar universities are a tool for national development, however the solution they provide are in an arithmetic progression while the problem is escalating in geometric proportions.
Unless the new capacity added to the system is exponential like the NVU offers, then Nigeria’s’ Educational woes may tarry. A new University built with over a billion Naira could only offer to admit only 5000 of the 700,000 desperate youth seeking for knowledge. The NVU in the next couple of years would be able to absolve the excess capacity that the Nigerian university system cannot absolve.
THE INSTITUTE OF MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY
Quite noticeably, the importance of man power that will not only form the drive behind the technical details of the pressing projects but also constitute the human resources and technical skills that will actualize the NVU cannot be overemphasised.
To this end, the planning stages of the NVU include plans to put in place a formidable institution in Nigeria that will ensure that there are always skilled men and women that will provide the much needed technical backbone behind courseware development, implementation, dissemination, administration and maintenance.
As a way of institutionalizing the knowledge-base for multimedia development in Nigeria, these options shall be considered:
1. Professional Certification:
2. Development of Indigenous learning methods and patterns
Professional certification
The field of e-learning, instructional design, multimedia technology, web development and administration, and animations for in recent times has been dominated by foreign visual communication companies like INTEL, MICROSOFT, ADOBE , AUTODESK, BLACKBOARD and AVID and Open source application developers e.g. MOODLE, CAROLINE, ATUTOR etc.
These companies offer certificate examinations that qualify successful candidates for high end professional capabilities and proficiency. The NVU will require these human capital development schemes to cut down the inevitable high cost of out-sourcing the technical frameworks that it will run on.
Therefore, the NVU shall establish relationships with some of these companies for mutual and optimal benefits. This translates into the development of Certification and prometric test centres, as an integral part of the Institute of Multimedia Technology.
Indigeneous training and research
The NVU hopes to gain the support of relevant local academic
institutions in Nigeria, and interact with relevant universities and
college abroad, ensuring an affiliation that will promote the vision of
the THE INSTITUTE OF MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY.
Introduction
of seminars, workshops and lectures at the grass roots will also ensure
that traditional norms and values find effective digital platforms and
help in the discovery of creative talents that will express our culture
effectively in electronic formats.
The Virtual Counselling Guide is better described as an unbiased profile of career opportunities offered at all tertiary institution in Nigeria. It simply an effort to address the imbalance that have evolved in the choice of courses consequential to unfair relegation and neglect of the so called “Non-Professional Courses”.
It is believed the prompt implementation of a virtual Counselling Guide formatted as Video documentaries, Interactive DVD’s or as an Online Module before establishing the NVU will help steer up the needed mindsets that shall prepare secondary school leavers and for Virtual Universities and boost their sense of choice.
THE DAYLIGHT FOUNDATION (In memory of Prof. G. Olalere Ajayi)
The Daylight foundation, a proposed Non-governmental Organisation (NGO) was conceived as a memorial and the celebration of the life and times of Late Prof. G. Olalere Ajayi (OAU, ile-ife), the ‘Father’ of the Internet in Nigeria, who championed the “Brain gain/brain drain” Concept.
The Facilitating the Foundation became a prerogative under the NVU project as a way of taking advantage of one of the main Objectives of the Foundation; developing a rich Nigerian Knowledge bank for evolving virtual learning environment, that will be fuelled by Philanthropic and good willed Nigerian educationists, academicians and consultants within and without the country.
The official luanching of the Daylight foundation will precede the implementation of the NVU, as one of the sureties for rich and up to date e-content, that will collated in a systematic way taking all pedagogical factors into consideration.
The NVU thus will aid the foundation in rapidly fulfilling its primary goals and objectives by providing significant support towards the actualisation of the foundation’s proposed Knowledge Information storage System (KISS).
The KISS has been established to aid the e-content collation efforts by the
Foundation, saving, sorting and storing lecturers’ academic efforts in
time. It is being designed to preserve the life time work and
achievement for generations beyond now to access and utilize for
teaching and learning.
The NIGERIA VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY will require two major sets of facilities:
Accessibility units
Administrative units
The administration of the NVU will span over the three major phases.
In phase one that may begin October 1, 2009 and will last for two
academic years, rented buildings will be converted into Seven
Administrative units which will be located across the Six Major
Geo-political Zones and Abuja until the buildings and facilities are
constructed.
Phase B begins when the NVU facilities have been constructed and implemented.
NVU's Central Administration facilities (The Senate and the
Secretariat) hosting the Vice-Chancellor, the three Deputy Vice
Chancellor, the Director of Development and Director of Research, and
The Deans of Faculty and the Registrar are located at the central
Administrative Unit in Abuja. Also, the NVU's Geo-political
Administration Units, a Phase B project, will host the:
The multimedia studio
The e-content collations centre
The Teacher/student support Centre
The Content Repository Unit
Phase C will be kick-started by the metamorphosis of the NVU into a
complete National Educational Telecommunication Outfit that run majorly
on Mobile devices and utilize fifth generation pedagogical
methodologies in disseminating course modules. The realization of this
phase however, will depend entirely on a predictable technological
evolution and stability.
All institutions of higher education, online or "brick and mortar," are expected to openly provide information on their accreditation to prospective students. They should clearly state that the institution is "accredited" and should list the accrediting agency.
For example, The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a non governmental coordinating agency that recognizes accrediting agencies in the United States and helps to coordinate policy and research on accreditation issues. They also maintain an international database of accrediting agencies and institutions.
However, there is only one accreditation standard that is recognised by 148 countries by inter-government agreement. This is the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard.
In order to differentiate NVU from the competition emerging in the global higher education economy, which threatens NVU’s distance education market, the allocation of time and resources to achieve ISO 9001 IS necessary.
Therefore NVU shall achieve the ISO 9001 quality accreditation during its first Phase (Phase A) for the following processes:
• Courseware design and development;
• Project management;
• Audio and video production;
• Photographic services;
• Distance learning evaluation;
• Examinations preparation and production;
• Telecommunications support;
• Microcomputer support;
• Systems administration;
• courseware production and distribution;
• multimedia development;
• graphics design;
• instructional design research;
• electronic publishing;
• student support systems;
• technical consultation, installation and repairs;
• network design and maintenance;
• Organizational management.
The achievement and maintenance of ISO accreditation will reflects NVU’s commitment to continuous improvement and organizational development in terms of corporate management, from an international perspective.
In Nigeria, accreditation of institutions of higher learning is conducted by the following bodies:
The National Universities Commission;
The National Board for Technical Education;
The National Commission for Colleges of Education
These bodies have their respective criteria, guidelines and regulations that tailor the minimum standards required to set up any institution in Nigeria that will cater for tertiary formal education.
NVU hopes to meet the required minimum standard and be duly accredited to take all the intended courses.
In the mind, the planned NVU should form the following pictures:
A system whereby a lawyer sitting in his office which also doubles as his classroom has just finished with the fifth lecture on the DYNAMICS OF THE NIGERIAN STOCK EXCHANGE and he's about logging onto the school's website for the first Assessment examination. Though this quest to acquire knowledge will earn him a diploma, he is affirmative that dabbling into the stock market isn't much risk after all.
An intelligent society where everyone has a chance to be a scientist or master of an art. A roadside mechanic receives a degree in mechanical engineering and horizons expand as he can now offer top quality automobile repair and maintenance services, ultimately making life better for motorists and increasing public productivity.
A system that is flexible enough to allow newly-weds to continue their education even while on honeymoon or preparing for their life together.
A system that facilitates continuing education for persons who may
be entering the educational circuit on a relatively less advantaged
platform. One that provides means for dropouts, elder citizens, family
men and women and so on to return and get the needed education to
improve their lots in life and increase their chances of getting
further in their various fields of enterprise.
The Vision of adopting technology to tackle educational problems is not a new effort in Nigeria. However, the NVU is a sincere effort at bringing together resources to safe guide a prosperous future for Nigerians. The dream is open for suggestions, comments and criticism and of course, financial support by anyone who desires to witness an Intelligent Nigerian Society. Please note that the 'NVU' is merely a proposed brand, compared with the values that drive the brand. Our hope is strong that the values will suffice as our brand (NVU) or better still, a more compelling brand as long as the dream is realized. Academicians, Professionals, Students, businessmen, philanthropists, politicians, religious leaders, corporate bodies, in short, all Nigerians both at home and in Diaspora are invited to make the dream a reality.
Would you dare to dream with us?
To contact us, click here! .