It is often said that opportunity comes to those who are ready to take it on. But what happens when such opportunities do not come even when you are ready for it…you create one.

This is the example of Godfrey Okoye University with the hosting of the first International Virtual conference at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the world stood still and all hope seemed to be lost, doors of educational institutions shut against students and scholars.

As the world was lamenting and on lock down, the Vice Chancellor of Godfrey Okoye University Enugu, Rev. Fr. Prof. Christian Anieke was strategizing on how to move the University forward and maintain the global recognition the University has had. This gave birth to the hosting of the first International Virtual Conference on E- Learning and Training Workshop.

The One Day International Zoom Conference on E-Learning and Training Workshop was the first of its kind in Africa, attracting over 460 participants from across the continent with 7 guest speakers from Nigeria, Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

The Vice Chancellor, Godfrey Okoye University, Rev. Fr. Prof. Christian Anieke stated that the conference became paramount as Nigeria and the world battled the COVID-19 pandemic which halted educational activities around the world and consequently revealed new ways of doing things.

“COVID-19 is not a curse from God but a challenge that opens the windows to different opportunities and the conference is a confirmation to it. For the first time, we are staying so connected, getting all categories of professors all over the world to be online and talk to students and their colleagues all over the world. The virtual conference is the first of its kind in the University”.

Universities all over the world should embrace the situation and make utmost use of the opportunities it has provided, especially the ones in Africa, to tap into the resources that abound in the European world”.

In his paper presentation on the “Changing Face of University Education and its Challenges in Africa”, Rev. Monsignor Prof. Obiora Ike, Director, Globethics.net Geneva reinstated the agenda of Globethics.net Geneva which is to strengthen the ethical compass in education that has become relevant than before.

“Godfrey Okoye University is leading one of the first E- Learning conferences in Nigeria which has been challenged by many fronts such as unreliable electricity, public institutions with big buildings and spaces but lack of technological innovations. Covid-19 has brought these challenges and more into the fore for everyone to realize that a building does not make a university.

The digital conferences reinstates a sense of involvement of all those who are participants towards creating a new phase for higher education on the African continent”.

Key points concerning the changing phase of higher education institutions globally and particularly in Africa.

The school and role of education is the formation of all round personalities. The school not only impact knowledge but add other elements such as the social, psychological, the personality and sole dimensions that have mentors, role models who enter the larger scope of the world to add value. It is in the university that talent initiative, orientation, livelihood and above all, personal ingenuity is conceived.
A library, and teachers make up a university, not just halls. The library gives the student a knowledge of the past, present and future (research potential) and teachers help you to realize and understand that which a student needs. A university is not just the space but the knowledge that helps you develop the character, ethics, information, link out to the world behind you and helps you add value.

The Changing face of the University in Africa

The constant basic is that the university is recognized and centralized within a country, space or environment as the point for development. A university is at the heart of a community. It is where the human rational person adds value, by thinking and acting with an ethical compass which includes character. The changing face of the university globally is that the university succeeded in giving young people knowledge and reach out to the social component but didn’t give them models for character reformation. We have people who attend university but come out not as professors or qualified persons but like people who are charlatans.
“The marketing of universities is what universities should never do. Where student are often called customers, education is described as commodity, universities are labelled as service providers and centres of business; buying them cheap and selling them to the highest bidders.

Teaching is not seen as a vocation; education becomes about ranking and targets, and running low quality. Courses are taught with no heart, spirit and no meaning. Taught by stressed, fatigued, overworked and not valued faculty. Education becomes the delivery of the lowest possible cost, exam results are hugely inflated to keep the customers happy and not complaining.

This is what the university has become and it is happening because of an agenda of what they call the new liberal module where we have opened the doors to the destruction of all that makes life good and worthwhile.

The changing face of the university is that the university must become the centre, space and place where human beings, especially the young have an orientation for life. This is where ethics comes to the centre stage. The Globethics.net agenda, is to ensure that ethics in higher education is the way to go. The founders of Globe ethics where motivated and inspired by deep emotional commitment and sense of responsibility to bring into the forum for global conversation, the topic of ethics.

C. S. Lewis said “education without value as useful as it is seems rather to make humans more clever devils”.

We need the university, the universitas and the universe, where the world meets itself to achieve that a great global problems like climate change, population growth, environmental degradation, extinction of species, inequality, intolerance, racism, refuges, xenophobia, terrorism, economic irresponsibility, displacement, exclusion, division and inequality is addressed.

The changing face of the university is not to exacerbate the fact of marketing of knowledge but to integrate knowledge to serve the human being. To serve the human being means that the challenges we face is conquerable and this is the example of Godfrey Okoye University.

There is in no inhibition to integrate our ability to translate powerful motives into action and this powerful motives needs tools like digital technology, the online technology, and the face to face teaching models.