According to Tim Akano, Managing Director and Chief Executive of New Horizons, the use of Information and Communication Technology that guarantees virtual education can save Nigerian universities over N150 billion annually
According to him, Ghana earns $1billion from Nigerian students annually. He believes $1 billion retained in Nigeria will create 1 million jobs in the education sector! The anaswer is in Virtual Universities he said.
Akano maintained that the feelings among some top government functionaries that ‘Nigeria cannot succeed with virtual universities was the same thinking on the eve of Nigerian joining the league of GSM countries.
“One of the bidders who later regretted his decision said openly that Nigerians are too poor to afford GSM telephone in a way that would make the successful bidders recovers their $150million investment in fi ve years.”
He continued: “There is a global wave of change across the educational industry`. There is clamor for the ‘’reeducation of education’’.
The system today is too expensive and ‘’wall-off’’ so many brilliant young minds because of space constraints and limited infrastructure in the traditional universities. This will be achieved through online education.
For instance, last year, a small startup company that hosts classes for 30 universities in the US trained 1.7million students in its online courses last year. This is 1.7 million that the tradition brick- and- mortar universities would have fenced-out.
Akano opined that the issue of quality of virtual university should not be used as a factor to sustain the Berlin Wall of traditional university.
He stressed that right now, thousands of Nigerians are undergoing courses like Money Management, Information Technology, Sales and Marketing to complex ones like Artificial Intelligence and Engineering at IMT, Harvard, and Stanford among others.
Source: National Mirror