Former Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, believes that modular education can hold its own against traditional university degrees, given the current educational landscape and global requirements.
Particularly, the immediate past Vice President noted the potential of modular education to provide relevant skills and knowledge that are in demand today.
Osinbajo stated this in Abuja at the weekend when he delivered a keynote address during the matriculation ceremony of MIVA Open University.
According to him, teaching methods and resources are changing and must continue to evolve, thereby creating an increasingly personalised form of education in order to encourage studying at one’s own pace.
The Guardian reports that modular education refers to an educational approach where learning is broken down into smaller, self-contained units or modules, allowing students to focus on specific skills or topics.
Osinbajo said this is a result of high preferences in the area of employability, which is centred on innovation, efficiency, tech-savviness, problem-solving techniques, and skilled collaboration with employers.
He added that in employment criteria, the emphasis now is not on how much information one has but on how it can be used to solve real-life problems, which are multifaceted and not tied to the curricula in many of the old and existing disciplines.
His words: “So micro-education could potentially rival university degrees in the future, especially as the world of work and learning continues to evolve.
“Adaptive learning platforms can now, as you know, use artificial intelligence to design coursework that meets the specific needs of every individual student and the best pace at which to teach each student.
“Now and in the future, what we will teach and how we will teach will never be the same again. This change is motivated by the type and quality of employee that the market wants today and that the market will take for granted tomorrow. And also how technology, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, is rapidly transforming business, the professions, and the entire marketplace.
“We are also going to see more teaching using virtual and augmented reality. All these sorts of equipment are already available. Technologies that use these immersive tools will provide hands-on learning that can be repeated over and over again by the student.”
To the students, he said that while they focus on their educational pursuits, critical ingredients to purposeful living—including integrity, hard work, and collaboration—must remain as guiding principles, while noting that it is about what endures beyond one’s immediate lifetime that matters.
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Reiterating that the virtue of integrity has become a scarce commodity and that few people possess it, Osinbajo added that it is a currency for business and interpersonal relationships.
“What, then, are some of the critical must-haves or must-dos for real success? What are these critical things? The first is integrity. Integrity might sound like a cliché today, but it is absolutely the cornerstone of real success.
“Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Be known for your consistency in applying high moral values and principles. If you borrow money, you pay. Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil. Integrity pays. It is getting scarcer. It’s getting more difficult to find people of integrity. So, it is in high demand. And I can say that because people of integrity are in demand; they are much sought after by everyone.
“Even thieves are looking for men and women of integrity to keep their stolen money with. Life is a marathon. It’s not a hundred-metre dash. The person who will last that marathon is a trustworthy person because trust is the currency of business and interpersonal relationships. If you are known to have no integrity, everyone will soon know it. And because many of the best opportunities you will get will be based on recommendations, it is easy to become unmarketable,” he said.
