The Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said over 2.5 million Nigerian students have so far enrolled on its Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services (TERAS) platform.
Executive Secretary of the Fund, Arc. Sonny Echono stated this on Wednesday in Abuja at the Second Registrar’s workshop and 75th business meeting of the Association of Registrars of Nigerian Universities (ARNU).
Arc Echono who appeared as a special guest at the event, explained that the TERAS initiative was developed by the Fund to address critical challenges faced by students, researchers, and institutions in accessing educational resources and research materials.
He underscored the need for Nigerian students to come onboard the digital services platform and take advantage of the various opportunities it provides.
The Guardian reports that the platform was unveiled in October 2023 by the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman.
Some of the technologies captured under the platform include the Beneficiary Identity Management Service (BIMS), Aggregated Research Journals (EBSO), EagleScan for plagiarism, Blackboard Learning Management System among others.
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According to the Executive Secretary, TERAS provides centralised hubs for tertiary educational services, where tertiary institutions, students, and researchers can access world-class educational resources, monitor research for plagiarism, and many other educational activities.
He also hinted that the platform could be open for students and researchers in private tertiary institutions if those in public higher institutions fail to take advantage of fully utilising the programme.
“We have also met with the students unions. The National Association of Nigerian Students is with us. In fact, I have been threatening our public institutions that because we have excess capacity, if they don’t finish taking them up, we will extend it to private universities because they are Nigerian students,” Echono said.
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“However, we want to give them the opportunity first to finish onboarding all their students.
“Currently, we have over 2.5 million students enrolled. But my biggest biggest concern, again, which is also another advantage of MoUs, is not so much availability that people are enrolled. We are interested in the usage. How many students are using all these facilities?
“So what we did is to create a platform called TERAS and on that transform, we have put all these resources so that the moment it has an overlay of an identity management system, we call it Beneficiary Identity Management (BIMS). And once you are registered on BIMS, it gives you access at no cost to all these learning resources.”
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