NOUN TO EMPLOY 50 PHD HOLDERS THIS YEAR, SAYS VC

The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) is to employ 50 PhD academic staff this year with a view to strengthening its services, Vice Chancellor of the institution, Professor Abdallah Uba Adamu has

said.

Professor Adamu told Daily Trust exclusively in Kano today, that the new employees include professors, doctors senior lecturers and lecturer one but all of them with PhD degrees, insisting that the university will no longer employ any academic staff who does not have a PhD certificate.

He said: “The reason is that NOUN is not a conventional university with classrooms where you can employ a graduate to teach as an assistant lecturer. Rather it is an institution where we communicate with our students through an Open Distance Learning (ODL) method.

We have to write the studies materials and writing studies materials requires expertise; somebody who is good in research, investigation and who is good in writing reports. It is therefore critical for us to have people who are excellent in conducting research and writing reports and we feel hose with PhD are already poised to do that.”

Professor Adamu added that 83 academic staff of the university, are currently outside the country studying for their PhDs and that their programmes are massively drawing huge resources from the university.

“So instead of spending so much money in training staff, we will rather employ readymade PhD holders so that we can create a stronger structure with less money” he said.

He also said parts of his plans for this year, is to launch the institution’s its new integrated website in January and streamline its 78 studies centers across the country.

He lamented that the centers have one problem or the other; some of them physical and others deals with human being, saying the institution would come up with a strong and integrated approach that will ensure provision of better services to its clients.

“So, our hope this year is that our studies centers would be more empowered and more strengthen in order to operate at their full capacity so that we can admit more students into this particular

university,” he concluded.