P rof. Ademola Tayo is the new Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University. While unveiling his vision to transform the university into a total digital classroom and campus and for 21st Century learning experience for students, lecturers and parents, the new VC in this interview with Technology Journalists in Ogun State said that he was committed to producing digital students for tomorrow’s workforce.
Excerpt:

By Emeka Aginam

My vision for Babcock University

The vision of this present administration is to consolidate on the gains of the previous administration particularly on the area of Information Technology to drive e-learning in the 21st century education.

Although Babcock University has been leveraging on IT, this new administration will push it further.

That is why we are collaborating with the WiniGroup/IVETEC to implement a Total Classroom and Campus Digital Revolution (TCCDR), the first of its kind Nigeria. It is designed to reposition our model of delivery to ensure better assimilation and creativity from students and make  lecturers more productive.

The TCCDR project is an end-to-end, first-of-its-kind- robust collaborative e-learning designed to enable the students, lecturers and parents and the school administrators collaborate in a new integrated way that will further enhance academic excellence and boost our university’s global ranking as a foremost technology-driven university in the same league with the best universities in the world.

We will use cutting edge technologies to deliver lectures to students. There will be a software application whereby parents will be able to monitor the progress of their children’s academic work. With the project, the era of chalk has gone. All our classrooms are installed with projectors, inverters, interactive technologies, in-motion-biometrics, and best-in-class-software that will make learning more creative.

The new administration is very passionate about using technology to deliver lectures to the students. With the project, all our lecturers have gone through intensive training on TCCD technologies and about five hundred (500) new HP laptops are being distributed to the lecturers as we speak.

The TCCDR project will make our students relevant academically locally and internationally. At the end of the day, we will be producing digital students for 21st century challenges.

Addressing power challenge

To address the power challenge and achieve virtual classroom, we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MOU, for an Independent Power Project, IPP, which will totally crash down the amount we spend on power. This is to ensure regular power supply at reasonable cost.

What we are trying to do is to block leakages, particularly now that we have many private universities that are coming up right now. We are very sensitive to that and as a not- for-profit institution; we want to be sure that we do not push the parents beyond their means.

We will do our best to ensure that what is reasonable is what we give to our students and their parents but at the same time we do not want to compromise when it comes to quality.

I can assure you that we will take everything into consideration because we are non-profit organization, we do not want to put too much pressure on our students and parents.