- * As ACETEL Supervisors Set Standard For Student's Research Projects
By Adline Obiozor (Education Correspondent, in Abuja)
The Africa Centre of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning (ACETEL) has undergone a review and auditing of its procurement activities from 2019 to date.
The exercise was being carried out by a procurement auditing firm, jointly appointed by the National Universities Commission (NUC) and the World Bank.
The firm will conduct the review in all the 17 Centres of Excellence in Nigeria, which is in line with the requirements of the Second Africa Higher Education Centres of Excellence for Development Impact (ACE-Impact) Project.
The Messrs Cosset Consultants, Okoye Ifeanacho, Mathew Chukwumalume and Gabriel Zachariah, along with ACETEL's Procurement Officer, Kazeem Onubaiye, and the centre’s auditor, Paul Aliyu, carried out the exercise on Monday, May 8 and Tuesday, May 9, 2023 at the ACETEL conference room in Abuja.
ACETEL centre director, Prof. Grace Jokthan, gave the go-ahead for the exercise to begin as Onubaiye presented receipts requested by the consultants to show clarity, transparency and adherence to the established procedures.
The review and audit was done by the consultants in line with the Africa Centres of Excellence projects audit reviews.
Meanwhile, the Africa Centre of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning (ACETEL), has held a meeting with supervisors in the centre to deliberate on the format for the students’ research project report.
In her opening remarks at the meeting, which took place on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, the director, Prof. Grace Jokthan, revisited the issue of supervision allowance which supervisors had complained about in the last meeting as being little.
She said the centre and the postgraduate school had thoroughly considered the plea and sought the Vice-Chancellor’s approval for an upward review of the supervision fee, which he approved.
“As academicians, we really cannot pay for knowledge and services, we can only attempt to pay some remuneration to help compensate for our time and efforts and I will also request that you kindly bear with us.
“This is an ongoing process and as we increase in the number of students the centre has, as well as the fees to be paid continuously, from time to time, it will get better,” the director said.
Programme Coordinator, Management Information Systems (MIS), Dr. Juliana Ndunagu, presented a thesis outline for MSc and PhD for ACETEL programmes on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity and Management Information Systems (MIS).
The supervisors, who are all PhD holders, made various suggestions of what should be included in the thesis format and what the format should look like for the students as all the three courses technology-related.
Jokthan assured that the suggestions would be incorporated into the thesis format. NNL.
