Prof.
Ademola Tayo is the new Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University. While unveiling
his vision to transform the university into total digital classrooms and campus
to meet the learning challenges of the 21st Century, Tayo, in this interview
with Bankole Orimisan, said that he was committed to
producing digital students for tomorrow’s workforce.
Excerpt:
Vision
for Babcock University
The
vision of this present administration is to consolidate on the gains of the
previous one, particularly on the area of Information Technology to drive
e-learning in the 21st-century education.
Although
Babcock University has been leveraging on IT, this new administration will push
it further.
That is
why we are collaborating with the WiniGroup/IVETEC to implement a Total
Classroom and Campus Digital Revolution (TCCDR), the first of its kind Nigeria.
It is designed to reposition our model of delivery to ensure better
assimilation and creativity from students and make lecturers more productive.
The
TCCDR project is an end-to-end, first-of-its-kind- robust collaborative
e-learning designed to enable the students, lecturers and parents and the
school administrators collaborate in a new integrated way that will further
enhance academic excellence and boost our university’s global ranking as a
foremost technology-driven university in the same league with the very best in
the world.
We will
use cutting edge technologies to deliver lectures to students. There will be a
software application whereby parents will be able to monitor the progress of
their children’s academic work. With the project, the era of chalk has gone.
All our classrooms are installed with projectors, inverters, interactive
technologies, in-motion-biometrics, and best-in-class-software that will make
learning more creative.
The new
administration is very passionate about using technology to deliver lectures to
the students. With the project, all our lecturers have gone through intensive
training on TCCDR technologies and about 500 new HP laptops are being
distributed to the lecturers as we speak.
The
TCCDR project will make our students relevant academically locally and
internationally. At the end of the day, we will be producing digital students
for 21st-century challenges.
Addressing
power challenge
To
address the power challenge and achieve virtual classroom, we have signed a
Memorandum of Understanding for an Independent Power Project (IPP), which will
totally crash down the amount we spend on power.
This is
to ensure regular power supply at reasonable cost.
What we
are trying to do is to block leakages, particularly now that we have many
private universities that are coming up. We are very sensitive to that and as a
not- for-profit institution; we want to be sure that we do not push the parents
beyond their means.
We will do our best to ensure that what is reasonable is
what we give to our students and their parents but at the same time we do not
want to compromise when it comes to quality.
Research
in the University
Yes,
three mandates for any university are: teaching, research and community
development. I believe that you should not go into something that you will not
do well. For instance, we decided to outsource the power project to an IPP
because we believe we should focus on our area of competence and not just try
to do everything by ourselves. We have handed over a land to them to begin.
It is
not going to be financed by the university but they will finance it and sell to
us and the agreements show that light will not blink for even one minute. If it
blinks, the collateral damage will be for them such that we are expecting that
there will be 24 hours of uninterrupted power supply of electricity.
You know power is so important for educational
institutions because if you want to do information technology, you have to have
regular power supply.
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