By Segun Awofadeji
The Vice-Chancellor of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU), Bauchi, Prof Muhammad AbdulAzeez, has stated that the country’s education system needs to focus on producing graduates equipped with the skills needed to be successful in the workforce.
The university don stated this during a two-day workshop for North-east universities’ staff on ‘Outcome Based Education’ (OBE), organised by ATBU in collaboration with the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN).
According to the vice-chancellor, the training was for academic and non-academic staff of the Faculty of Engineering in all North-East universities. He said outcome-based education is an approach to education that prioritise learning outcomes over the traditional approach of focusing on rote memorisation.
“The focus is to develop essential skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving, rather than simply learning facts. Outcome-based education can help ensure that we are producing graduates with the necessary skills, as well as the knowledge, to be successful in today’s world. It is thus our belief that outcome-based education will help create a more equitable educational system by focusing on essential skills that would ensure all students, regardless of their background or educational history, have the opportunity to develop the skills necessary for success,” he said.
The Registrar of COREN, Prof Ademola Adisa, said the workshop’s main goal was to train the participants to acquire knowledge and skills of Outcome-Based Education to train others in its implementation in Nigerian universities.
He said outcome-based education is an approach to education that focuses on specific attributes in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitude that must be exhibited by graduating students, adding that the workshop was for the North-East region.
He listed the regions where such a workshop had taken place as; Ahmadu Bello University for the North-West, the University of Benin for the South-South, and Enugu State University for the South-East.
Others are the University of Abuja for the North-Central, the University of Ibadan and Afe Babalola University for the South-West.
“The Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria is a statutory organ of the federal government of Nigeria that was established by decree Number 5 of 1970 and amended by decree Number 27 of 1992. COREN has the mandate to regulate and control the practice of Engineering in all aspects and ramifications,” he explained. “At the education level, on behalf of the federal government of Nigeria, COREN determines the academic standards of courses and accredited programmes to be offered by the institutions that are training engineering personnel.”