Lucky Obukohwo, Reporting
The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), said plans are on the way to extend Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform to private universities just as it said that over 2.5 million students have been enrolled into it from the public institutions.
The Executive Secretary of the agency, Sonny Echono, also said that the platform has excess capacity but public institutions are given the preference of onboarding first before it is extended to private universities.
Echono spoke in Abuja at the 2nd Registrars’ Workshop and 75th Business Meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU), with the theme: “Sustainable Legal Framework as Panacea for Industrial Harmony in the Nigerian University System: Challenges and Remedies.”
“I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend the opportunity to private universities, because they are Nigerian students too.
“Currently, we have about 2.5 million students enrolled on the platform. But my biggest concern, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability, that people are enrolled, but we are interested in the usage, how many students are using all these facilities?
“We invested huge resources on the platform, so at the moment it has an overlay of Beneficiary Identity Management (BIMS), and once you are registered on BIMS, it gives you access, at no cost, to all the learning resources, whether it is all the 4,000 libraries that are available”, Echono added.
TETFund explained that TERAS was launched in 2023 to provide a centralised hub for tertiary education services, thus fostering collaboration, efficiency, and innovation, and providing a wide range of capabilities and functionalities for tertiary education institutions, students, researchers, and the entire education ecosystem.