By Alice Etuka, Abuja
Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), Arc. Sonny Echono has said that over 2.45 milion students have been enrolled on its Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform.
Echono disclosed this on Wednesday, April 24, 2024 while fielding questions from journalist at the Second Registrar’s workshop and 75th business meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU) in Abuja.
He explained that TERAS was developed by the TETFund to address challenges faced by students, researchers, and institutions in accessing educational resources and research materials.
Speaking further, he underscored the need for Nigerian students to come onboard the digital services platform and take advantage of the various opportunities it provides.
Some of the technologies captured under the platform include the Beneficiary Identity Management Service (BIMS), Aggregated Research Journals (EBSO), EagleScan for plagiarism, Blackboard Learning Management System among others.
Echono informed that TERAS provides a centralised hub for tertiary educational services, where tertiary institutions, students and researchers could access world-class educational resources, monitor research for plagiarism, and many other educational activities.
He also hinted that the platform could be open for students and researchers in private tertiary institutions if those in public higher institutions fail to take advantage of fully utilising the programme:
“We have also met with the students unions. The National Association of Nigerian Students is with us. And in fact, I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend it to private universities because they are Nigerian students. But we want to give them the opportunity first to finish onboarding all their students.
“Currently we have over 2.45 million students enrolled. But my biggest biggest concern, again, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability that people are enrolled. We are interested in the usage. How many students are using all these facilities?
“So what we did is to create a platform called TERAS and on that transform, we have put all these resources so that the moment it has an overlay of an identity management system, we call it Beneficiary Identity Management (BIMS). And once you are registered on BIMS, it gives you access at no cost to all these learning resources”.
The TETFund helmsman further emphasised that as custodians of records, registrars play a very key in the success of the platform:
“The registrars play a very key role because they are the custodians of records. Data is a big issue in Nigeria. In our educational system, even the tertiary we have been able to do a lot about that but even if you go down, you will see it a lot.
“And that is why it has been prioritized by the present administration, that our educational data should be credible should be up-to-date. And it should be available in a ubiquitous manner for people to be able to access because you can’t plan effectively if you don’t have credible accurate data. And that data is being done through Information Communication Technology (ICT) so we are working with the registrar’s to ensure that”, he said.
