NOUN as National Open Nigeria: My Experience

In 2012, I elected to take a postgraduate diploma course from the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). I registered and paid the fees that I was billed. I wasn't able to sit for the examinations immediately because I had just registered before the examinations. I didn't do magic. I opted to wait till the next year to write the exams. And it did work that way for me. Unfortunately, I had just started a journey of insolence, arrogance and all sorts of airs and ineptitude that's spanning nearly a decade. The PGDE is normally a year course. It normally took one from one area of pedagogy into education. In my own case, I had a Bachelor of Arts degree in Igbo, which was in the Arts/Humanities from the University of Ibadan (UI). UI usually offered the Master of Education (M.Ed) to those who wanted to segue into the field of education. I was in Aba and UI and Ibadan wasn't my ambition in 2012. I wanted another experience from them.

I registered and studied alone but had to sit for examinations with other students, who were strangers, at Umudike, Umuahia, Abia State, Southeast, Nigeria. The staff were the most unfriendly lot I had met anywhere in the world. They were condescending in the most insolent way and insolent to their students. Many of them didn't even possess a bachelor's degree at the time of their engagement with the NOUN institution. But it was their turf and I played along. But there were issues and I am going to talk about them under the following headings:

1. Missing Results: What are they? Missing results means that you took an examination and instead of getting your grade, NOUN tells you that your results are missing. What really constitutes missing results? From my experience, I've discovered that the study centres, in this case Umudike, removed the scripts from the pack, probably didn't even mark them and sent others to Lagos to be recorded. I once travelled to Victoria Island, Lagos in 2014 and discovered that the school didn't have any of my assumed missing papers/answer scripts. I thought that going to Lagos could help me discover why my results were missing. So, they are actually missing examination papers/answer scripts rather than missing results. The study centre is the unit messing students up. Again, I once opened the portal to find a score for a course, that went missing at another time that I checked my portal. I had to retake a paper that was entered as having been completed. Unfortunately, I didn't have a print out of the result to have gone to query the inconsistency. When I did ask them in the office, they had no tangible answer for me. How does this happen in a civilized country? Missing and that was the end and all the trouble had to be borne by me, the student. That's ineptitude, in my book.
2. Character & Learning: Like most institutions in Nigeria including the University of Ibadan, character & learning is nearly always touted as the basis for the award of certificates. What actually constitutes character and learning? Character and learning, as far as I'm concerned is the ploy most institutions employ to humiliate their students. What do you have that's character? What learning? Yesterday, I read a letter from the NOUN headquarters warning me that I wasn't supposed to insinuate the University a scam. Hear my side of the story. I had paid course registration fees and examination fees over the years that have totalled over N200, 000 (two hundred thousand naira) and this didn't include all the bus fares to Umuahia from Aba, which should total over N300, 000. I have had to bear that cost myself, with family and a friend helping only once. I have had to study in the last nine years (until 2017) when I believed that the centre was playing with my time and resources. When I had to rewrite an examination, which the school claimed that I failed, I had to study with cards and my textbook. I got those cards from the USA and used them to make jottings of course material and uses them when I was shuttling for my examination. I used them and left them in my bag, which was left downstairs of the Government College, Umuahia, the centre of one of the NOUN examinations. During this particular examination, a few of the NOUN staff came in and passed materials to students. One of them sat beside me and was writing a course in Accounting. This was in 2016, I believe. I was cross with him and established my dissatisfaction with the NOUN staff but I had my own examination to do. As I finished my paper, went downstairs and picked up my bag, I went up again to retrieve a piece of paper, an examination slip, from one Mr. Enyinnaya, the IT guy. As I waited to get the paper from him, I removed the revision cards from my bag and stood in front of their make shift office and went through my jottings, evaluating my own effort in the examination. Mr. Enyinnaya came out of his office and exclaimed that I had with me cheat cards. I asked him how that was possible. He claimed that they were small enough to be used as cheat material. I replied him that they weren't cheat materials and that I never used them in the examination classroom. He didn't believe me. I told him that another student was caught cheating with an iPad by the centre counsellor one darkskinned Dr. Chinwe Ihuoma. An iPad was big enough yet somebody was able to cheat with it. It didn't matter the size of a material what mattered was whether or not it was used to cheat. Sometimes size makes a material useful. Nobody is able to haul a mainframe computer anywhere, but today people do much with their smartphones, which provide ease. Would use a cheat paper in an examination if you could? That's where integrity comes in for that very person and matter. Cheating wiht the aid of an iPad wasn't ever possible but somebody else pulled it off. He, Enyinnaya, wasn't there to catch the cheating student. Heck! In my own case, I was standing in front of his office and not in the examination hall or classroom. He didn't catch me using them during an examination and they weren't meant to be cheat material because they weren't even folded nor bent as most cheat papers were folded in order to hide them in body parts, like the armpits, laps or waists, etc. Those ones weren't folded and in fact, I lost faith in the intelligence of the Igbo man that day. He was berserk with lunacy if not that he had a job or deceived people with one. What a desperado. What did they do to the guy with the iPad? I didn't find out as I left the examination venue after the incident very disturbed by the arrogance of the Igbo nation. So, tell me how NOUN checked the character and learning of its own staff? He was just shamed that he couldn't find a cheat in an examination hall. He wasn't even invigilating examinations that afternoon and the result came out with an F. Is this not an indictment of the institution in not using checks and balances? Why right have NOUN staff to help students cheat during examinations in front of other students? Is that the character and learning that President Buhari and his cabinet think will lead us into nationhood? I don't think so.
3. Feedback: While I studied abroad, students were given the opportunity to rate their teachers. A website is used for that purpose when schools weren't interested in rating them themselves. For instance, there's Rate My Professors, which is a website for students to rant about their teachers. I wouldn't know what feedback students gave but most students told the truth about their unskilled teachers. As an open and distance learning (ODL) institution, the National Open University of Nigeria should allow students the opportunity to provide feedback on centre staff. But this will never happen where anarchy reigns supreme. I contacted the Centre Director of Umudike in March, but till date I haven't received a reply from him. He probably doesn't even read his email. I went in to speak to a student counsellor and she told me to see the IT people. I found out after I tried to reregister that I was assumed to have graduated. For nearly, one month until yesterday, nobody could tell me that I graduated since October, 2017. Nobody sent me email about the graduation. I'm billed to get the certificate from Abuja. I requested to have it sent to Enugu and the institution insisted on my travelling to Abuja to get a certificate. Why couldn't they post it to me in Abia State? I would have to do a clearance in Abuja after paying more money in Umudike and doing centre clearance. What is Nigeria turning into? A place where an institution is set up without accountability? It's been nearly nine years and NOUN appears unconcerned that it has become nearly a scam as far as my experiences go. What is a scam? A scam is a clever and dishonest plan for making money. It is a dishonest scheme; a fraud. Paying money without receiving the requisite service and/or product is a SCAM. A racket. The devil must be in the details. Now, they (one Mercy in the accounts office and Ayowole, the IT guy) at Umudike claim that their graduation clearance portal is down at NOUN headquarters. 
4. Accountability: NOUN has no accountability towards its students. The Academic Office in Abuja is asking me, a victim of NOUN's insolence from the centre director, the student counsellor (Chinwe Ihuouma) and even nearly all the staff, to apologize for enduring the impudence of its staff. I don't understand how an institution that wouldn't even graduate students on time nor provide accurate information to them is giving out certificates based on how long and well one has endured humiliation. I want the Federal Government to call all concerned to order or close down the institution or suspend its activities until sanity returns to its operations. Or this must be the ONLY way Nigeria works. 

To be continued....