While the National Open University offers flexibility and accessibility to Nigerians who need distance learning opportunities, it also has disadvantages. If you want to enroll in a program in NOUN, it is important for you to know their disadvantages to enable you to make an informed decision ahead of time.
The National Open University has many disadvantages, including limited employment opportunities, limited courses of study, no provision for research, and no student-teacher relationship, among others. This means that if you graduate from NOUN, you may likely encounter one of these challenges or the other.
5 disadvantages of national open university
There are many disadvantages of the National Open University. So if you want to enroll in their program, you should know them to enable you to make an informed decision beforehand. Some of the disadvantages of the National Open University are discussed below:
1. Employability Problem
One of the major disadvantages of NOUN is their unemployability. Greater percentages of students who graduated from National Open University find it very difficult to get employment opportunities.
Most employers in Nigeria do not employ those who graduated from NOUN because they normally see NOUN certificates as less standard since the students don’t normally have hands-on experience with practicals since it is distance learning. The truth is that when it comes to having the experience and expertise needed for employability, you can’t compare those that finished from NOUN to those who graduated from regular universities in Nigeria.
2. There is no Proper Student Monitoring
Another disadvantage of the National Open University is that there is no student monitoring. NOUN is designed to be flexible; hence, they only offer distance learning, which makes it impossible for lecturers to monitor and guide students properly. Sometimes, students from NOUN may even graduate without meeting their lecturers one-on-one, which affects the teacher-student relationship that is detrimental to educational settings.
As we all know, going to school is beyond getting a certificate; mentorship and character moulding are also very important for the full impact of education to be evident in the society, but these attributes are not available in NOUN since students only get educational materials online without proper monitoring.
3. Limited Courses of Studies
When it comes to the course that NOUN offers, they are limited since they are not eligible to offer professional courses that require laboratory experiments and technicalities. For instance, NOUN doesn’t offer courses like medicine and surgery, nursing, medical laboratory science, etc. So if you want to enrol in a professional course in NOUN, you won’t be able to get admission since NUC doesn’t accredit them to offer such important courses.
4. Limited Research
This is another disadvantage of NOUN. Students of National Open Universities in Nigeria are not researchers. In fact, most of the NOUN centres across the country don’t have functional laboratories where scientific experiments can be conducted. This means that NOUN is not for researchers; if you are looking forward to becoming a researcher in the future, then you have no business with NOUN because you won’t get anything from them when it comes to research.
5. Administrative Irregularities
The last disadvantage of National Open University on our list is that they don’t have an excellent administrative structure. In Noun, there is no established method of administration to guide the students on the best way to go about their courses. Since most of their activities are done online, if students have issues, they may find it difficult to get it resolved because there is no standby guide on the best approach to get it resolved. As a sequel to this, most of the NOUN students often complain of regular extortion because unscrupulous elements can create fraudulent websites to defraud students in the name of NOUN due to administrative laxity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it advisable to go to NOUN?
Yes, if you want flexibility and distance learning, NOUN is an ideal option for you. However, if you want to study a professional course and have hands-on experience, you shouldn’t go for NOUN because they don’t offer such value.
Is the National Open University certificate recognised?
Yes, certificates from NOUN are recognised. However, there is a problem with its employability since many employers don’t hire Nigerians with NOUN certificates because they see them as being substandard to the ones obtained from public and private universities.
Do National Open University students go for NYSC?
According to Tribune, the Nigerian Senate passed a bill to grant NOUN graduates the opportunity to participate in the NYSC and enrol in the Nigerian Law School. This means that students from the National Open University can enrol in the NYSC program. However, as of the time of compiling this article, NOUN students have not started participating in the NYSC program.
