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From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), has disclosed over 2.5 million students have been enrolled in its recently developed Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform.
It explained that TERAS was launched in 2023 to provide a centralised hub for tertiary education services, thus fostering collaboration, efficiency, and innovation, and providing a wide range of capabilities and functionalities for tertiary education institutions, students, researchers, and the entire education ecosystem.
Executive Secretary of TETFund, Sonny Echono, further disclosed that the platform has excess capacity but public institutions are given the preference of onboarding first before it is extended to private universities.
Echono spoke in Abuja at the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), with the theme: “Sustainable Legal Framework as Panacea for Industrial Harmony in the Nigerian University System: Challenges and Remedies.”
He said: “I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend the opportunity to private universities, because they are Nigerian students too.
“Currently we have about 2.5 million students enrolled on the platform. But my biggest concern, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability, that people are enrolled, but we are interested in the usage, how many students are using all these facilities?
“We invested huge resources on the platform, so at the moment it has an overlay of Beneficiary Identity Management (BIMS), and once you are registered on BIMS, it gives you access, at no cost, to all the learning resources, whether it is all the 4,000 libraries that are available.
“The open learning resources, whether it’s the anti plagiarism checker that will enable you check your assignments and your thesis and all that. But they are all on this board, and the Blackboard learning platform very useful for our registrars too in terms of administration and the governance of the institutions.”
Echono further disclosed that TETFund is about connect all National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) Study Centres nationwide with ICT fibre infrastructure to improve access to resources by all students.
ARNU National Chairman, Ife Oluwale, in his remarks said the workshop was to help Registrars of Universities smoothen and sharpen their skills and be abreast with current trends in university administration globally.
Oluwale said the Association was committed to the capacity development of its members, and believes that a trained staff is an invaluable asset to any organization. “They bring not only expertise but also efficiency and a higher standard of quality to their work. They can navigate challenges more effectively, adapt to new situations with ease, and in the long run contribute significantly to the overall success of the organization.
Oluwale who is the Registrar of Ekiti State University thus appealed to proprietors of universities and other agencies of government to show better commitment to the training of Registrars and other personnel, while commending the efforts of TETFund in that regard.
