NUC packages universities for Internet

By Tom Chiahemen

Senior Correspondent, Abuja

The National Universities Commission (NUC) has commenced the process of fine-tuning the Nigerian Universities Management Information System (NUMIS) to provide reliable, comprehensive and up-to-date data on university education in the country.

The project initiated about 10 years ago could not be sustained "owing to budgetary and other constraints", according to NUC Executive Secretary, Prof. Peter Okebukola.

According to Okebukola, the idea of NUMIS is to capture as much data as possible on academic and support activities in universities and make them available to the government, private sector and civil society.

Okebukola said in Abuja Monday that the new-look NUMIS was expected to provide information on statistics on university education aggregated at the department, faculty, institution, and national levels, student academic records and transcripts, staff records, funding profiles of universities, academic programme status, and physical development pattern.

It will also provide information on quick estimates of indicators, such as transition rates, drop-out rates, carrying capacities and internal and external efficiencies, classification of institutions in terms of their performance and monitor the manner in which this classification changes, institutional and countrywide data for micro-level planning and management of university education and complete programme matrix for each level of aggregation.

"When fully operational, every vice-chancellor, NUC staff, students and indeed any interested person should be able to access statistical data on Nigerian universities through the Internet and use such data for administrative, research, and strategic planning purposes," explained the executive secretary. He added however, that some of the data such as students academic records would not be available in the public domain but in a secured and pass word protected environment accessible only to authorised personnel of the university.

Okebukola announced that seven universities, which claimed recently to have reached an advanced stage of MIS software development, had been constituted into a technical committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwen (Teledom International), with Mr. Chris Uwaje of Connect Technologies, Lagos, as a second external member/resource person; Dr. Aminu Ibrahim (representing the Department of Information and Communication Technology of NUC) and Mrs. Tyna Emerole of NUC as secretary to the committee.