Qualitative Education in National Open University of Nigeria(NOUN) Versus Conventional Universities in Nigeria

Overtime, Nigerian's have held a perception about the quality of National open university of Nigeria (Degrees) owing majorly to the Phrase 'Open' in its name.

Many of this perceptions are formed subjectively without due fact checking on the operations of the institution.

Anyone, who has passed through a conventional university and also NOUN for further studies would reiterate the qualities NOUN exhibit by their operations.

The following are what stand them out from a conventional university:

1. The Separation of Teacher and Learner:
One major distinguishing feature of open and distance learning system from
the conventional system is the distance between the teachers and the
learners. They do not live or meet at any time.
The advantage of this is multifaceted. Overtime we have heard and seen how Lecturers lure female students and vice versa to elicit Higher Exam marks and personal gratification.
Such test of integrity is not in the open university since a student may never meet his/her lecturers even after graduation.

2. Collation of Exam papers: The decentralization of marking like it is done with WAEC, where students script in Lagos, may be marked in Calabar or Abuja, makes it almost impossible to influence your grade, unlike the conventional university where, rich students and immoral girls can influence their grades by luring the lecturers. In Noun, you must read to pass

3. The Conduct of the exam in NOUN is done in such a fashion that different departments and different levels sit mixed together in the exam hall. This helps to reduce to the barest minimum, cheating in the exam hall

4. The examination questions of NOUN compared side by side with conventional universities, reveals how tasking and qualitative NOUN educational system is

5. The Lecture materials of NOUN compared to some of the Conventional universities shows how detailed and rich, NOUN instructional material is compared to this other universities. In NOUN, most of the lecture materials are inputs of up to five(5) lecturers (Professors, Phds) both working in NOUN and other universities.

Finally, the keyword' Open'
behind the philosophy of open and distance learning like as In NOUN simply means, 'to open something, you must
admit that it has been closed before' (Mishra, 2002), thus by default, we must accept that education system have been closed before now and there is the need to open it up.

There has to be Openness as to people seeking higher education. This means that access to higher education has to be increased.

Presently, in Nigeria, even with our fast increasing population and the growing demand of university education, the conventional universities can't admit more than 10,000 students at a time across all program because of the limitation of facilities and teaching methodologies. However, NOUN, been the largest institution in Nigeria in terms of population with about 500,000 student, has helped to cushion the effect of this ugly scenario, because the effect to the nation would have been disastrous if that huge numbers are still left on the street to keep struggling for admission into the few conventional universities we have.

The afore-mentioned above, are reasons why all Nigerian's should come to appreciate and embrace the ideology behind Open University as it is in other advanced Nations of the world.

If we must transform from our our underdevelopment to a strong developed nation, then education of our citizenry is core and the quick realization of this is easily made possible and sustainable by the ideologies of open education.

I rest my case.

Yours' inspirationally,
@iamtundegold