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Babcock varsity to produce digital students, says VC

By Bankole Orimisan
27 April 2016   |   1:21 am
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.
Prof. Ademola Tayo, the new Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University

Prof. Ademola Tayo, the new Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University

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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