Vice Chancellor, Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, Prof. Deji Agboola, in this interview with reportors, narrates the institution’s achievements in its 40-year existence and plans for the future. Assistant Editor Bola Olajuwon was there.
The areas the university has excelled in the last 40 years.
We made it clear that we are the first to make use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to conduct Post-UTME. You will recall that during the COVI-19 pandemic, everybody was running up and down without knowing what they could do to conduct an exam for more than 25,000 candidates. During that period, the government was also saying one third of the candidates could sit down somewhere. What we did was to ask our colleagues in the Computer Science Department to see how we could make use the AI.
Before we applied for Post-UTME, we did about five rounds of those tests and it worked well. We are applying it to virtually all areas of learning in this university. We are doing more of digitilisation. We are working on cancer screening to have a control study of those that have breast cancer and those that do not.
We need sophisticated equipment that is worth $11,000 to help us to do the test in such a way that we can use AI to actually develop a screening, like the glucose kit to screen those that are going to have diabetes or not. It is that kind of equipment we want, instead of cutting people to do biopsy. If we are able to get that equipment, we will be able to screen cancer patients before they now come for confirmatory diagnosis by the pathologists. So, we can use that to do mass screening for people that are likely to have breast cancer.
How institutions can do better through endowments
Anywhere in the world, the government alone cannot fund education. Those institutions outside the country of which we are proud of are not being funded by the government. Institutions will do better through endowments than government funding.
Government is doing its part through subvention. At the same time, we also need to have individuals and corporate organisations that can actually invest and do a cost-benefit analysis of what programmes we are running and their benefits to the community, state and the nation. We have no fewer than 265,000 persons, who have graduated from this university and some of them are captains of industry. If 1,000 of them can give this university N1,000 every month, it will translate into N100,000 a month and N1.2 billion each year.
If an institution is well-managed and it gets a good endowment, the university will do well. I think the government should create an enabling environment for the university to grow.
There are so many ways the university can generate money; it is not just through the increment of tuition fees. Though the government needs to fund it, the managers need to look at the institution as a business venture through which they can generate funds internally.
How we defeated cultism to attract funding for projects
If the image of the university is good, everybody would want to identify with the institution. Years back, this university was known for cultism and nobody wanted to identify with it. There was a time we were having meetings with the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona. He told us one of the reasons he found it difficult to come to the institution was because of cultists.
We then told him that was in the past. We told him that we have CCTV cameras to monitor activities in the campus. Before 2012, we could hardly get 2,000 candidates seeking admission. However, when we solved the problem of cultism, the university’s image immediately changed.
The following year, more than 30,000 candidates applied. Since that time, it’s been on the increase. Then, the Awujale came and instituted a professorial chair on governance to the tune of N500 million, which was the first endowment that we got. Since then, Awujale has about seven state-of-the-art projects in the university like the Vice Chancellor’s Residence and the University Chalet.
Similarly, Chief Kensington Adebutu built a N200 million Radio Station for us at the Mass Communication Department and another structure in the University Teaching Hospital. We also have the Pastor Enoch and Foluke Adeboye’s Dialysis Centre.
When it comes to funding, of course, the way the students were treated would go a long way in determining if they would return. We are changing the narrative because we are products of this place and we know what happened when we were in school.
We used to have chalk and markers but today, if you go to our classrooms, what you see is amazing. We are also changing the environment in which they are learning because it has a way of affecting their psyche. So, if we make the environment more serene, students will be able to say they want to identify with the school.
If you go to the Teaching Hospital at Shagamu, they have standing air conditioning system in the classrooms. How will that student graduate and not want to come back? If you go to the Faculty of Law and you see the seats there, you will be impressed. Last Friday, one of our alumni gave us a 750-seater hall.
Another is building an Information Technology Centre at the Faculty of Law. We have our Business School here, which was just completed. In a way, the alumni see the university as their own and we are still talking to many more.
We believe that if the alumni do all these, it will reduce the pressure.
On the university’s work study programme for indigent students
One of the ways to encourage the students is to ensure that those who are indigent can complete their programmes, which is why we are also into work study.
We did a study and we discovered that in the last five years, an average of 2,000 out of the 30,000 students were unable to pay their tuition. The management reviewed it and discovered that we could start with a scholarship. So, we started giving the indigent students scholarships, if on second class upper and above. Until last year, we discovered that it couldn’t go round, which now resulted in a review. Having worked and studied abroad, we decided to introduce their system here in the institution through the work study.
We want to plan for 2,000 of them at a go, and some areas that we believe that they will be able to work and do well to include the library, mowing and bakery. Just like in the UK, where students are given 20 hours per week, which is two hours per day, we believe that the same can be applied here. What we want to do is that by the end of the month, students can have money that can take care of their school fees in a session.
We will do it in such a way that no student will be given the money because it could be spent by them.
What OOU is doing to reconfigure some courses to fit into national realities
Interestingly, NUC is migrating from Basic Minimal Academic Standards to Core Curriculum Minimal Academic Standard. That means that 70 per cent of the courses are centrally designed by NUC for all universities, while the remaining 30 is left to the individual universities, according to what they want their university to be known for. That can be applied in virtually all the courses.
Every course is interrelated. For instance, a course like Philosophy will always be there because there is Philosophy behind every course. In this university, we are trying to modify some of the programmes to meet the needs of society. We’ve looked at it globally and we’ve seen that there is a need for us to identify the skill gap that our products will naturally have when they get out of the school. Maybe that is why people say that some of the courses in the Humanities should be changed.
However, I have a different view, there was a time in this university when the number of students were used to determine if a course would be run or not. For religious studies, the number of students they used to have was not up to 10, and we had professors there.
So, we said to ourselves ‘if we cancel this, the motto of the university would be defeated because we pride ourselves on Omoluabi because our colour is blue.’ In Yoruba, blue signifies calmness and boldness.
And if we are going to produce Omoluabi, it has to do with morality and religion is part of it, which is why everybody goes to mosques and churches. If we train those people, they will man the churches and mosques, making society better. There is no course that is useless, it depends on its application. When you look at course benefit analysis, Medicine should have been cancelled a long time ago because it produces 60 students with 15 departments; not less than six lecturers in each department, including professors to produce just 60 students.
Whereas in the Faculty of Science, the departments are not up to six and in each department, there are no fewer than 120 students at a go, without needing more than six or seven lecturers to produce those 120 students. So, in a way, it depends on what we are looking at in the society and how society will look back at the institution.
The university’s technology inroads and quality of products as greatest achievements
Looking at the quality of our products in comparison with the circumstances surrounding the school when it started, it is one of our greatest achievements. We started with about 522 students and now we have about 30,000 students. If you look at the quality of our products, the environment is really major.
For instance, the principal officers here, from VC to the two Deputy VCs, Registrar, and Librarian, all finished from this university. A lot of Provosts and Deans are from here.
We have our products that are doing well in the banking sector, like the Managing Director of Polaris Bank. Also, the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, who lectured here for a while and his wife, an alumnus of this school.
We have others in the judiciary and politics who are doing well. These are the things we are proud of and the technological inroad we have made in areas of AI. We would think that other big federal universities would have done that earlier, but we are the first to lash on it.
We also take our major classes online. If you don’t have the time to be in the class for a lecture, you can actually connect to the school’s free Wi-Fi and join the class online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we had our classes online and became the first school that used artificial intelligence to screen candidates for Post-UTME. You can see our ICT centre; it’s a massive one with over 3,000-seater. It’s the largest.
We have the best virtual library in the country because NUC asked for three or four databases, but we have 26 databases. It’s well- equipped. So, every time we have visitors, we like to showcase our library to them because it’s the best.
In the area of technology, we use smart boards to teach. It’s Internet enabled and gives live experiences during practical exercises. We pride ourselves in the area of technology. We have a system in which our results come out two to three weeks after examination.
For instance, last year, our students had an examination from December 17 to 18 and we were able to do the convocation in January. In most cases, you don’t find it possible, except with technological inroad that we have.
So, what we do is that when they finish examinations, we upload the scores. The system automatically calculates the GP and all that. Even the fresh students will have a copy of their results. When we talk about the transcript, the ones we have problems with are those of the students who graduated a long time ago. But for those who graduated 2015 to 2016, it’s seamless in getting their transcripts. You can even have your student’s copy because it’s there. So, these are the two things that university is proud of, our technology inroads and quality of products.
