My dear University Community,
I hope this finds you well. The recent decision by the Federal Government to close universities for about 3 weeks is a big blow to the UofA’s efforts to recover from the devastating University calendar which has been a bane of our suffering for some years now. We were working hard towards a return to a time our staff can enjoy their summer break and have two to three months they can relax, travel, do research or embark on anything that pleases their hearts as academic staff. The three weeks election break will not help the UofA to achieve the idea of academic year which we have sought to have and to which our staff have suffered a great deal working around the clock.
Management has decided that the three weeks election break, while students will go home, WILL not be a break for UniAbuja staff and students. Rather, it will be a period that all our University will transfer teaching and learning 100 percent to virtual system using electronic technology to continue the academic process and wherever in the world our students choose to travel to during this break they can still participate with their lecturers and attend electronic classes and submit assignments and earn points towards their academic semester.
The Point here is that the University of Abuja wants to make sure that after the three weeks election break which must be enforced, the UofA is not going back in its calendar but move it forward to the logical conclusion of the academic calendar approved by Senate.
There are many advantages in this for our University. One, our staff would not be called upon to continue the Labour of having to struggle to do a crash program to finish the calendar. Second, our calender would move forward to achieve our goal to eventually reach a time staff can earn for themselves regular summer break of rest, and third, our students would graduate at record time and parents would be happy for it.
Please know that the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Research (CITR) and the ITMS would both help lecturers that on their own have never used the virtual system and now have questions on how to do this transition. Please call or email the directors of those centres for assistance, [email protected] or [email protected]; itms@uniabuja Edu.ng, or [email protected], and each Centre on its own would also reach out to you on what ways you can choose to do this in a manner that is convinient to each lecturer, i.e, Google platform, whatsApp, Microsoft team platform, UofA virtual classroom system, etc, etc.
I want to thank staff and students, postgraduate and undergraduate alike, for their understanding and assure everyone that this promises to be an excellent experience for our University and also another way that the UofA distinguishes itself in the Nigerian University system. The Election break does not affect all the IGR centres as they run a totally different system and some are already engrossed in virtual classes. If our staff had not been on strike during the Corona Pandemic lockdown of 2020 this exactly would have been the UofA’s choice at that time to keep going the academic activities and imagine how far away we would have been in our academic calendar today!
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