Dr Suleiman Usman, Provost Shehu Idris College of Health Science Technology, Makarfi said on Tuesday that work is going on to fully digitise all official activities in the institution.
Usman said the college had already established an e-library and was making efforts with Glo network on networking the entire college.
“It is not only going to be e-library alone, we have already measured the parameters, service will be available all over the college, wherever you are within the college you can easily access the Internet.
“However, the e-library is part of the 2019 revised budget of the institution, it has been approved, we are waiting for the money.
“In addition to that, by next year the college will begin Computer-Based Tests (CBT) entrance exam as against the old method of manual exam.
“We have already gotten and designed a place in the college, we are going to mount over 300 computers with full internet service, so that all our activities will be through the Internet,” he assured.
The Provost identified transparency as another of his priorities, recalling that initially, so many things in the college were being done under the carpet without the knowledge of the staff and even the management.
“I have set up the Policy Transparency Unit, so that whatever we do in the college is made public, everybody have access to what we were doing.
“If you need any information about what we are doing, we will make it available to you.
“Right now as I am talking to you, I have already liaised with the ICPC, and about five of the college staff will go for training at the ICPC headquarters.
“After the training, the commission will come down to the college to draft a standard procedure manual for the college so that everything we are going to do will be rotating within that manual,” he noted.
Usman also said that the college had introduced e-monitoring tool to measure lecturers’ performance.
He said: “One of the important things I will proudly say I have achieved is the issue of staff monitoring.
“Initially, our lecturers go to class at will, sometimes they go to the class outside normal or official hours to teach the students.
“Now each staff is being monitored by the use of a tool, this tool is used to examine the activities of both staff and students in the class and it is also used to evaluate the relationship between the students and lecturers while in the class.
“This tool is for every individual staff, we are going to use the tool to measure the performance and productivity of every staff in the college, unless you pass 70 per cent to 80 per cent, you will not be promoted.
“It is an e-tool when you go into the class, it will identify you, the teacher will tell us the subject he/she is going to teach, then those that are doing the monitoring and evaluation will also go to the class and see,” he said.
He said timetable of each staff would be made available to the monitoring unit who would be going round to confirm and record where appropriate.
The Provost said the monitoring unit was also saddled with the responsibility of listening to the lectures to ensure that it was within context.
“If the lecturer is lecturing outside the context, we will detect it, again, the response of students to lecturers is another thing, are the students understanding the lecture or not?
“At the end of the whole exercise, we also have a tool, it is called Teacher Performance Evaluation Tool, this comes up when students are about to write their examinations.
“Before students write any examination, a questionnaire will be given to them to fill, are they comfortable with the teacher? Does the teacher teach the course to the later? Has he/she been given them notes? Did they pay for the notes?
“These are some of the questions to be answered by the students and we call them pre-examination tools.
“This questionnaire and the daily routine evaluation will be combined to come up with the performance of every lecturer,” he said.
The Provost said financial activities of the college are now online, to block some leakages discovered in the accounts section.
“If the college is to pay you even N1,000 it has to be through the Internet, in fact, my accounting staff don’t even see money, they only deal with papers, including myself.
“Another area is the aspect of registration of students especially new intakes, so many bad things happened during registration exercises,” he said.
