For many years, I’ve been putting together New World University, a distance learning university meant to make higher education more accessible to students in lower income countries. As one might imagine, it’s not an easy goal to reach. It took several years just to find the right people to build it with, most notably Kola Bakare, my brother from another mother. Then we spent five years running a pilot project, putting together a complete curriculum for a degree in business administration from open educational resources, recruiting students willing to spend their time being our product testers, going through the entire program, and then reviewing what we’d learned as preparation for how to continue at scale.
We always knew that we were interested in focusing on professional programs, ones that would help our students build their careers. Ultimately, we realized that there was a way to provide this education to benefit both students who were interested in learning enough to get their foot in the door with a certification or two, as well as students who were interested in the longer term commitment required to complete a degree. We had also learned from running our pilot project that while online learning may be convenient, many students were keen to have somewhere physical to go to interact with their fellow students and to be in a better position to get to know the faculty members who were teaching them.
This led us to create two closely connected but distinct organizations. The first is New World University itself, which after significant consideration we’ve decided to base in the US, ultimately seeking accreditation from DEAC, an agency approved by the US Department of Education. The second is Success Learning Center in Lagos, Nigeria, a physical location with classrooms, academic advisors, career counselors, and regularly scheduled tutorial sessions so that students can get the hybrid learning experience that they’ve told us they want.
Success Learning Center is already in place and scheduled to open in the first quarter of the new year. The facility we’d been building to serve as a headquarters for New World University is simply being reallocated for that new purpose. And as an organization we are now a member of the Nigerian Institute of Training and Development, which means we’re authorized to design, build, and deploy certificate programs and market them to Nigerian students.
So if we’re running full speed ahead with certificate programs, what’s the use of New World University? Each and every program that Success Learning Center develops will use resources from New World University, and both organizations will offer them. That way, when students have earned enough certifications through the training center, they can stack them into an Associate or Bachelor degree from the university, and meet both their short term and longer term goals, both in terms of education and credentials.
We’re pretty excited about this approach: short term certificates for those whose needs are immediate, degree programs for those who are planning ahead, hybrid courses for those who want that face-to-face interaction, and online-only courses for those who want to maximize convenience, all within the same educational ecosystem.