An oil magnate, Babs Omotowa, has called on education administrators to adjust curricula to keep pace with evolving and disruptive trend on digitisation and be ready for the future.
Omotowa made the call while delivering the 19th Convocation Lecture of the Igbenidion University, Okada in Edo State.
According to him, how capacity is built and how knowledge is acquired will have to be different for Nigeria to compete in global developments.
He said the traditional approach of memorising and regurgitating, as the basis of acquiring knowledge, was becoming less valuable as such knowledge could now easily be recalled by the push of a button on digital devices like phones.
Knowledge acquisition, he explained, had been digitised and people could now easily “Ask Anything” of Google and get the answer.
Omotowa added: “Secondly, as the future will see less traditional jobs, the current education system that is geared to producing job seekers will need to change
“This is so for children to graduate as creative entrepreneurs, with business plans at hand.
“Universities have to evolve from ‘teaching knowledge’ to ‘teaching how to learn and apply knowledge’.
“The value of education will not be the certificate or courses that students graduate in.
“The value will be in their ability to think critically, select the right data, interrogate and extract new insights, make choices and take action to solve problems.
“If the capacities of our youths are built this way, Nigeria has the best opportunities to navigate the impact of the global trend.
“Thirdly, the quality of education in our universities needs to become much better and globally competitive in teaching, cutting edge research, innovation and international outlook.
“Our graduates will increasingly be competing with their peers globally, and a situation where no Nigerian university is ranked among the world’s top 400 universities is simply not where we should be.
“In some countries, our graduates are now required to undertake a two-year conversion course before they can be admitted to Master’s programmes.
“Fourthly, more collaboration between universities and private firms will be required.
“This is not just in endowments and grants, but also in the real-time intersection between research and application to enable innovations in new frontiers like on carbon capture.
“Such are seen in world-class universities like Yahoo’s 75 million dollars Energy Centre at Stanford University.”
Omotowa noted that the world was slipping into an era of age imagination where creations that could match human beings intellectually were occupying the same space on earth.
This, he said, was arising from progress in Artificial Intelligence, alongside disruptions brought by digitalisation, automation, and virtual augmented reality.
He said: “They provide great opportunities and challenges, which can be inspiring or terrifying.
“Most importantly and depending on how you respond to these, they enable those who can dream to hold the aces.
“Artificial Intelligence is applied in transportation, housing, education, business and medicine, among others.”
Omotowa charged the graduates to embrace entrepreneurship as the key for the future as there would be fewer jobs as the world population grew.