NUC warns varsities against unnecessary delay of students’ results, transcripts

By Joseph Erunke

ABUJA- THE National Universities Commission, NUC, has warned Nigerian universities against unnecessary delay of students’ results and transcripts.

This came as it began collaboration with the nation’s ivory towers on boosting the use of Information Communication Technology, ICT, saying the move was aimed at arresting cases of missing results and transcripts of students.

The Director in charge of Directorate Research, Innovation and Information Technology, NUC, of the commission, Dr Suleiman Ramon-Yusuf, said this during a meeting between the NUC board on ICT development and the directors of ICT from all Nigerian universities.

Mr. Raymond-Yusuf, who said the commission was worried about incessant cases of missing results and transcripts of students, said the collaboration was aimed at ensuring that universities embrace the use of ICT, to ensure a seamless academic and non academic operations.

According to him, the issues confronting the system including missing results and delay in collection of transcripts, was due to the analogue method of operations in universities.

Yusuf stressed that the board was committed to resolving the challenges confronting the use of appropriate ICT tools in the universities system, by ensuring the right polices, adequate resources and capacity building were put in place by government to drive the process.

Hear him: ”The board has shown serious interest in ensuring that we leverage on ICT to the extent that we can actually optimize the use of these technologies to drive teaching, learning and research in Nigerian universities, so that our graduates will not just be ICT savvy but will be graduates who have a mindset that explains innovation as a driver of development at individual and national levels.

“This is why the committee of the board is here to discuss with the universities to find out what their issues are, what their perceptions are about ICT and most Importantly, the status of ICT in Nigerian universities in terms of infrastructure, in terms of capacity to use what is available and what ever gaps there are so that we as the regulatory agency advising government on how to intervene, so that government will be able to drive policies that will strengthen the leveraging of ICT in the Nigerian universities system.

“By the time we finish this process, it will be a thing of the past for any university to be unable to resolve some of these issues. Actually it is an embarrassment in 2018 that students are looking for transcripts. Transcripts should be available at any point in time in an organised university system.”

Chairman NUC ICT development committee, Engr. Johnson Osinugo, noted that ideally, no university should graduate students who were computer illiterates.

He maintained that the committee was working in a framework to correct the anomaly saying, “all Nigerian graduates or students regardless of department admitted into, will pass through an ICT training phase.”

Osinugo further disclosed that in order to meet up with global best practices, they were ongoing plans to make laptops available to students at a discounted rate, in-order to boost their academic and intellectual capacity to compete with their counterparts from any part of the world.