I thought I was on a wild goose chase of an Algerian university, arguably the first on earth to experiment with O connect teleconference, until I was acquainted early this month with Zineddine Lefafta, a 32-year-old marketer.
An Algerian resident in Skikda, the North Eastern Mediterranean port city of his country, Mr Lefafta is an O founder of onpassive. About 1.47 million of them are to be found in 200 countries. He had just pulled off what, arguably, was the first O Connect Teleconference which has the prospects of making an Algerian university the first O Varsity worldwide.
I was thrilled by the news in a Nigerian chat forum of this first teleconference in any university worldwide, but the information was scanty, almost unbelievable. I was interested especially in the identity of the only Nigerian professor who was involved in the epic teleconference because I thought his experience could make him become a catalyst for O VARSITY in Nigeria.
In the Nigerian O Varsity system, there would be no Nigerian desirous of higher education and qualified for it who would be turned away. In 2018, Nigerian universities enrolled 1.8million undergraduates and 242,000 post graduate students. In 2022, 1.8 million young Nigerians sought higher education. About 1.1 million of them were academically qualified, but there were placements for only about 500,000. About 600,000 were denied this human right. If higher education facilities do not expand, and the scenarios continue, about 3 million young Nigerians would be denied higher education by about 2027. The O varsity, as planned by onpassive, has the potential to clear this backlog in one fell swoop. That was why Mr Zineddine Lefafta toddler step with O connect in Algeria appealed to me.
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Soon, I will explain how I met Mr Zineddine Lefafta. Meanwhile, when I asked him to advise me about what happened in Algeria, he told me:
“I’m an ONPASSIVE brand Ambassador from Algeria. My journey with ONPASSIVE and O Connect began with a chance encounter with a university professor. At the time, I was working in private schools in my village, and the professor had three children who attended one of the schools. Over the course of our interactions, we developed a rapport, and he became open to discussing the potential of technology.
“In December 2022, the professor posted on Facebook that he would be hosting an international event via Zoom. Intrigued, I reached out to him to learn more about the event and his experiences with Zoom. He expressed his frustration with the platform, citing issues with audio-video quality, buffering, and overall user experience.
“Having used Zoom extensively myself, I was familiar with these shortcomings. However, I also knew that there was a better solution available: OCONNECT. I enthusiastically introduced OCONNECT to the professor, highlighting its superior audio-video quality, seamless performance, and user-friendly interface.
“The professor was intrigued by my description of O CONNECT and inquired about a solution for his email woes. He explained that he was constantly receiving storage insufficiency notifications, which hindered his productivity. I immediately introduced him to OMAIL, our innovative email platform designed to eliminate storage limitations and provide a seamless email experience.
“Impressed by ONPASSIVE’s suite of products, the professor decided to host his international event using OCONNECT. On October 1, 2023, he contacted me to confirm the availability of OCONNECT for the event scheduled for October 8-9, 2023. I eagerly provided him with my ONPASSIVE affiliate link, which he shared with the professors participating in the event.
“Within three days, an impressive 106 professors from 15 countries registered for the event. These participants hailed from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kurdistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Bahrain, Qatar, Singapore, and the United States. The event was hosted by the Faculty of Arts and Languages at the University of 20 August , 1955, Skikda, Algeria, under the title “International Forum entitled The Journey and the Traveler between East and West.”
“Following the successful conclusion of the event, I received numerous compliments from the participating professors, who were eager to learn more about ONPASSIVE and O CONNECT. Their positive feedback highlighted the impact of our innovative technology on the success of the international forum.
“Furthermore, the Forum’s Recommendations Committee officially recognised O CONNECT as an alternative to all teleconference technologies, acknowledging its remarkable performance and contribution to the event’s success.
“The first time O CONNECT was used at universities in the world left an impact on all the ONPASSIVE brand ambassadors.
“This experience has been a testament to the transformative power of ONPASSIVE and O CONNECT. By introducing these cutting-edge solutions to the academic community, I have played a part in enhancing communication and collaboration across borders. I am incredibly proud to be an ONPASSIVE Brand Ambassador and look forward to continuing to share the benefits of our technology with the world”.
The University of 20 August 1955, skikda, founded in 200I, has about 30,165 students, 1,111 academic staff and 1,191 workers. It took its name from the date of the killing of some Europeans and the retaliatory French massacre of thousands of Algerians.
Mr Lefafta reignited my interest in a Nigerian O varsity. Every year, about 1 million young Nigerians denied higher education travel abroad. Nigerian universities are aware of this. Some of them have set up branch campuses for “distance learning” in several cities against criticisms of poor quality teaching in these places. The Nigerian government has also set up the open university, but the connection between students and their teachers is still very poor. Additionally, strikes spanning several months by the academic staff union of universities (ASUU) mangle Nigeria’s higher education. Some students managed to escape from the firestorms with minor “burns”. One of them is Oluwanifemi Favour Olajuyigbe. She graduated this year from the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA) with a Cummulative Group Point Average (CGPA) of 4.93 out of 5.0 in electrical and electronics engineering. Oluwanifemi showed her colours earlier with 9 A1s in the senior school certificate examination (SSCE) and 306 over 400 points in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). She has been honoured by the Association of Professional Women Engineers in Nigeria as the best female university engineering graduate in 2023. When she took the award, Oluwanifemi made a statement germane to time wastages through strikes in the universities, a problem the O varsity may clear. She said she over stayed in the university by two years. That meant the strikes wasted two productive years of her life, and may have even derailed her dream.
I am passionate about the O varsity and about the capacity of O connect to deliver it and avert strikes in the regular Nigerian universities. I see the following scenarios in a Nigerian O varsity… Professors and other senior academic staff would treble or quadruple their income, the public universities would stop depending on the government for their budgets, there would be no paralysing union strikes such as the one which lasted for about eight months in an academic calendar year of 10 months, sometimes wasting between two and three years in the lives of their students.
If Nigerian professors had about 10 times more students to teach than they now do, and if their salaries grew 10 folds, far beyond the two folds the government cannot afford, would they, their students and society not be better off?, I always wondered whenever I hear of the latest news on O Connect and advances towards the O Varsity.
I was lucky that Mr Adebayo Olusanya, a Nigerian ONPASSIVE leader in Lagos, read my column of 10 November 2023 titled ONPASSIVE TOPS AT DUBAI HI-TECH TRADE FAIR. He made several photocopies which he sent to his friends nationwide until he learned that he could obtain an online version on NATION ON-LINE to which he referred many people in Nigeria and overseas. Some of these were Mr Mojeed Adetunji, a Nigerian ONPASSIVE leader in Ibadan, Mr Johnson Ejenavi, secretary of onpassive Nigeria vision, the onpassive umbrella body in Nigeria, and Dr Lanre Akinremi, Nigeria’s country leader of ONPASSIVE. When I informed Mr Olusanya that I advised my professor friends of the prospects of O connect during their last national strike and that I wished to know what happened in Algeria, he mentioned the request to someone who linked me with Zineddine Lefafta.
Until I heard from him, my assumptions were that the Algerian university was the university of Algiers and that it had begun to abolish classroom lectures for teleconference lectures for millions of students worldwide. My hope was that if about one million Nigerian students could plug in, there would be no need for them to go abroad and get trapped in such conflicts as the Sudanese war or the Russia Ukraine war. In the end, they have all been repatriated home, money lost, higher education adventure scuttled and their future uncertain. Wasn’t this a problem the Nigerian government and the public universities could have averted if they were open to new ways of doing things better, cheaper, faster, under less stress and yet with more value?
Mr Lefafta’s response to my chats suggested I was still too futuristic, although I still seriously believe the future is already knocking on the door, asking to be let in.
WHY ONPASSIVE?
If you ask me why I am always passionate about ONPASSIVE when I am known for Alternative Medicine or Natural Health, I would mention no fewer than three factors. From the bottom up, these are
• ONPASSIVE is going to come up with nutritional food supplements to be produced under the watchful guidance of high grade Artificial Intelligence (AI) three years above present market value.
• ONPASSIVE is coming up, also, with an application called O HEALTH. It is aimed at changing present Doctor Patient Relations in which middlemen or Interlopers drive medical bills up, govern the thinking of doctors in the consulting room, decree all sorts of labouratory tests and waste a lot of time in the consulting process, among all old features to be swept away.
3)Finally, ONPASSIVE is to make internet users govern the internet by giving them money for using the internet. Many onlookers of the unfolding new internet world order still cannot fathom this. This aims to shift power, money and ownership from a few individuals to the consumers, many of them poor persons who are so poor and grapple with poverty and daily struggles that they have no time to think about why they exist and what would happen to them after earth life. If the frontiers of existence are moving towards simpler, and better, less stressful, faster, more productive and yet cheaper ways of doing things which, on top of it all, yield more time for leisure and deep inner reflections, wouldn’t that be a better world to wish for and to tell the world about? Couldn’t our health improve if our headaches disappear?
On “O CONNECT”, a university lecturer can teach about one million students all over the world at the same time and in every language, including Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. All that a student has to do is to choose the language in which he or she wishes to listen to the lecture. Automatically, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology wired into “O CONNECT” will translate the lecture to the choice language(s).
In humanity’s march towards a new higher education age called O varsity, Nigeria, the so-called “giant of Africa” , appears to be sluggish. By United Nations(UN) account, Algeria’s 2023 population is 45 million, about five times smaller than NIGERIA’S of 225 million. Algeria’s university enrolment in 2021 was 1.5 million, and comprised 53 percent females and 47 percent males. Nigeria had 1.8 million students in university in 2019, excluding 242,000 in post graduate studies. The data suggests a higher access to higher education in a smallish Algeria than in gigantic Nigeria. Additionally, strict enforcement of Islamic norms would appear to have preserved women against male sexual ravages to enable many of them to end their educational career in the university whereas many young Nigerian girls are sexually devoured and experience education derailment by early pregnancies.
The cost of higher education globally is one of the problems in universities which ONPASSIVE, through “O CONNECT”, wishes to address with O VARSITY, the trans border global university. Denial of access to higher education because of space facilities in the lecture halls and conference centres is another.
In O varsity powered by “O CONNECT”, Nigerian students who are qualified for admission to university education but are edged out by high costs, or space limitations, spearhead of O Varsity, receive their lectures on line at specified lecture times and purchase digital lectures from their lecturers and professors. They can also save cost by working part time and full time while they are O Varsity students. To understand O Connect, imagine these hypothetical scenarios:
Lagos State University adopts “O CONNECT” for all academic lectures. Every lecturer sits in his regular classroom at the appointed time for his or her lecture, surrounded by some technical aids such as Zineddine Lefafta. The lecturer clicks on a button and O connect becomes live in all the countries where his students are. O connect can accomodate more than one million students in this single teleconferencing global university lecture theatre. There are no classroom wall barriers. There are no university campus gate barriers. The O connect classroom is a global classroom. Imagine that 300,000 Nigerian students scattered all over the country are listening to this lecture and paying for it through not only token cash subscription to the university but also through the purchase of O connect digital application. The purchase of O connect will be one off purchase. It is a data self subscribing application after purchase, through a special design of onpassive. Additionally, the student and the staff who purchase it will be entitled to an appropriate share of 50 percent of the company’s profit on the use of this application globally, if they are on the Affiliate Register of ONPASSIVE. They will also enjoy from onpassive the sourcing of fellow users as teammates for them. From these teammates, they will earn referral bonuses, earning income while they study.There is also something in it for the university and the lecturer and the professor. For a smart university, a student will register as O connect users under it. The university is thus empowered with hundreds of thousands of O connect users. From them, it will not only derive regular referral bonuses but also a share of the income of the digital textbooks or lecture notes which the students will be purchasing from O cademy, a substrate of O varsity.
In the foregoing scenarios, the dream of students for higher education is not shattered, the university may earn a thousand fold more income than it is now earning from sky rocketed school fees from a limited number of students. While lecturers and professors will be better paid by the university than the government can ever do, and, everyday, they will receive alerts in any international currency of their choice for their digital lecture notes and digital books which their students are purchasing everyday from O varsity. There is a caveat, though…the lecturers and the professors must be really sound in their vocations because they will be exposed through O varsity to the world academic community market where the students will have a choice. An African American student of Nigerian and American history in the United States will expect a Nigerian teacher to be a guru in this field. He wants real education. If he cannot get it from him or her, the student will shop elsewhere. The same will apply to an American journalism student who wishes to learn about press freedom in Nigeria. If he finds the most suitable teacher not in Nigeria, but in Germany, he cannot be compelled to buy Nigeria.
I saw this coming during the protracted strike for about eight months of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) for more pay and better facilities. I advised some of my vice chancellor friends, professors and lecturers of ONPASSIVE , “O CONNECT” and “O varsity,” urging them to not limit their sights to government-funded salaries and consider earning about 10 times more and much, much more than the government can afford to pay them in a shrinking economy.
Why many of them considered digital incomes undignifying or not worth their time is understandable. They are old and have not acquainted themselves with digital skills in a world rapidly going digital. They may become unemployable in the coming years when millions of secondary school pupils would be demanding digital higher education. In Lagos State, for example, secondary school pupils are no longer taught from the blackboard or the whiteboard but from the slide board. Some of them have learned to use the laptop. The innovation they would bring to the university may require that only digital literate academics become vice-chancellors, deans, heads of Departments, professors and lecturers.
