The National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) says its printing press,
which is almost ready, will be commissioned in January 2019.
NOUN’s
Director of Media and Publicity, Malam Ibrahim Sheme, in a statement in
Abuja, said the university had acquired state of the art machines
capable of handling the university’s printing needs.
He said it
was an innovative move by the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Abdalla Adamu,
targeted at cutting the high cost of outsourcing the production of
students’ study materials and maximising internal efficiency.
Sheme
revealed that NOUN had registered a commercial entity with the
Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) so that it could handle other
customers’ printing jobs.
He quoted the vice-chancellor as saying
that one of the reasons the institution acquired the printing press was
because commercial printer took advantage of NOUN.
“First, many
commercial printers force us to print more copies of study materials
than we need, all in the name of -the more, the cheaper.
“This is
more so for courses with few students; yet we always end up with
thousands of course materials as surplus, and eventually have to dispose
of them at a loss.
“With our own press, we can print on demand
for the exact number of students we have since our main focus is to
serve the students and not to make exploitative profits that the
outsourced commercial printers do.
“Secondly, we discovered that
many Study Centres complain of lack of study materials, even though
these are uploaded as PDF files on our website. But we do understand
that many people would prefer to have the printed versions as they may
not have access to internet at all times.’’
The
vice-chancellor said further that the cumbersome process of outsourcing
the printing of the study materials meant that students would have to
wait for weeks or even months before the materials get to them.
“With
the establishment of our own press, we have now eliminated the need for
contracting the printing of any type of printed material – whether
study materials, calendars, banners, posters, fliers, journals,
magazines, academic books, or monographs.”
The vice chancellor
added thirdly, that the institution could henceforth control the quality
of the output – particularly the layout, design and graphics, thus
enriching the content of the materials.
Adamu said that the press and the course developers and lecturers were all in the same place, NOUN Abuja headquarters.
“So
it is easy to effect corrections, thus saving time, which is impossible
with outsourced printers who print with many errors since they are not
academics and therefore have no intellectual understanding of what they
are printing.”
The vice-chancellor stated that the NOUN Press
could compete with any printing press in the country, considering the
vast array of modern printing machines it has acquired.
“We are
happy, therefore, to state that we have completely stopped giving out
contract for any type of printing in the National Open University of
Nigeria,” he said.
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