‘Over 8,000 students have applied for our online Executive Programme’

Online learning or eLearning is breaking physical barriers, giving students as well as teachers access to premium content from around the world. In this interview, GOSSY UKANWOKE, founder of BAU Research & Development and BAU Online Executive Programme tells STEPHEN ONYEKWELU about milestones attained and the road ahead.

What qualifies you to do what you are doing?

I think what qualifies me is being able to find professionals who can do the job and being able to create an enabling environment for them to do the job. This entails finding the best managers, the best teachers and the best administrators and even the best students and pulling them all together.

As a student I worked in the higher education industry. I created a platform for students to learn for free and worked with the university where I studied to bring about a technology powered online learning platform. I built an online portal for post-graduate students. This is what I have done essentially in the past in addition to advising a few African governments.

How about your academic qualification?

I have a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc) in Information Systems Management from the American University of Cyprus. I have another degree in E-Business from the American International University. That is it for my academic background.

What motivated you to start this Online Executive Programme?

I realised that people were yearning for knowledge and skills to help them improve on their performance. Individual managers and professionals, people who worked for other businesses or in their own businesses, wanted to learn something new or improve on what they currently knew. So, there is this constant need to learn, and this constant need to learn is what would help them with their performance at work and keep them on top of their games.

In some cases, people want to acquire knowledge and skills in fields that are unrelated to their current roles or in preparation for new roles. For instance, a professional manager might not have finance as part of their core competence yet needs some understanding of finance in order to be able to understand and communicate with core finance people.

What we are doing with our Executive Programme is to facilitate this process for executives. Gaining new knowledge and skills should not be backbreaking nor should it cost humungous sums of money. For instance, you might not need to spend one million Naira nor go to some physical campus in order to do so if you enrolled for our programme.

Our programmes are designed to cost only a fraction in terms of time, money and energy as it delivers value to the client. It is affordable for the student. As an institution we do not bear a lot of overhead cost around facilities and operations to produce the content. Students work online, the use videos, audios and text. Students have online study groups, they interact and sometimes they have offline assignments too. Learning is fun this way. We equally do have customised programmes designed to help companies fill in skill set gaps they identify and solve the problems they might have.

What set of criteria do you use in selecting students?

There are some key metrics that matter to us and the first one is completion rate. Our target is, if 100 people signed up for our programme, we expect 90 to complete. That is, our target is a minimum of 90 percent completion rate. Therefore we are interested in people who know the importance of the programme because that is the only way they would be committed to go the long haul. Even if they paid N1 million for the programme but do not find it important, they would not complete it. We need people who see the importance of the programme. Our programmes are affordable at N20, 000 for two months. This is highly subsidised.

How old is this executive programme?

We have been doing this for the last three years, going to four years, now. Over the last three to four years we have had thousands and thousands of students, over 8, 000 students applying for this programme from all parts of the world. We have students from across Africa, from Asia and South America on this programme. You know that cultural diversity boosts learning. They learn with and from one another, I mean our students.

In the last couple of years, we have had about 50 students who finished from our entrepreneurship programme and gone on to start their own businesses. These are some of the metrics we have so far, so good. We have equally seen our completion rate jump from 30/50 percent to 75 percent.

This is all from investing in technology, finding better ways to deliver the content of the programme, diversifying the content to more of audio-visuals and making the learning process more engaging. That is what we have been doing in the last couple of months.

What is the future of this programme?

The future is getting to personalised learning. We can do this for an individual or a company. We hope to get to the point where those who learn best by video get more videos, those who learn best by audio get more audios and those who learn best by text reading get more text. Of course we also see a future of tens and hundreds of thousands of students.

Some challenges?

Sure, pioneering a new segment of an already existing industry is a huge challenge; having to persuade people takes a lot of time and effort. Broad band penetration is another one. However, with more and more people getting used to Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Cosera and with time this will get better.