Ogunwole: Technology Application Will Enhance Leaning in Tertiary Institutions

What are the motives behind the entrepreneurship and innovation week that the university is organising this week on campus?

This is a maiden event for the university and we are going to make it an annual event, going forward. We are planning it big and we are using technology to drive it. The focus is to develop the entrepreneurial skills of the students, irrespective of their disciplines, which is one of our core values as an academic institution. It will expose students to various skills learning in the areas of textile design, fashion design, cinematography, robotics, cosmetics, events planning, among others and all these will be driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning ( ML). The one- week long event will feature talks and practical learning in entrepreneurship and technology innovation, and the idea is to build the competence of students outside of their course work in the university.

We have decided to divide the entire university into five entrepreneurship clusters and each cluster will be made of students from various disciplines with common interest for entrepreneurial skills acquisition. They will identify the cluster that best matches their interest and the cluster manager registers them and allows them to pick their team leaders. They will brainstorm on how to develop a company, what it takes to own a company after university education and how to sustain and grow the company. So it’s going to be self learning process under the guidance of cluster managers who are successful entrepreneurs. This is the way to teach this young generation of students, using technology and innovation to develop their innate abilities to enable them learn faster. If we teach them the same way we were thought decades ago, then we will be missing it.

What does the university want to achieve with the entrepreneurship and innovation week?

We want to achieve mastery of skills among the students and at the same time, raise students who will graduate to become entrepreneurs, who will create jobs for themselves and for others who will be employed by them. We are using it to prepare our students for the job market that is ahead of them so that as soon as they graduate from the university, they will not populate the number of job seekers, but will instead, populate number of employed Nigerians.

There is a disconnect between university graduates and the industry. Most times the industry players have to retrain young university graduates to cope with the required industry skills. What are you doing to address this?

We are very much aware of industry demands and we at Bowen University are teaching our students with modern curriculum that will help them acquire skills that are required for the present and future jobs. The American universities have been able to perfect marriage between their students and key industry organisations known as Fortune 500, and this has helped them to do a lot in the area of research. We are aware of all these and we are doing same to fully equip our students with the realities and demands of the industry. Immediately our administration came on board, we identified the industry needs and immediately stepped into action to achieve these needs for the students while they are still under our care. What we did was to go to Lagos to partner key organisations to understand their needs and to tell them of our challenges and to see how we can partner to better the lots of the students as they are leaving the university. The partnership is such that the organisations will send their staff to us to interact with students and identify ways that they could be of help to the university in addressing the disconnect between the universities and industry demands. So we are spending more time to change all of that and to change the old record of BowenUniversity, in terms of modern skills acquisition among this young generation of students.