By Esnath Kalawe:
Minister of Education Agness Nyalonje hailed Unicaf University for being the best online University in the country.
Privately owned Unicaf University on Tuesday in Lilongwe held its third graduation where 154 students from Malawi and other countries were awarded degrees from various academic disciplines
“The first thing to say as we stand here welcoming the graduates of Unicaf university (Malawi), we must acknowledge or appreciate the fact that Unicaf is the only university in this country that is fully online, all of its programmes are online.
“That is very different from what we have in other universities whether public or private where we have a blend of face to face traditional mode of learning and online learning, so when you say a university is online, it means everything is done online,” she said.
Nyalonje added Unicaf University represents the future where as a country; we are looking for because as government, they want to construct a platform where young people can access education where face to face will be combined.
Vice Chancellor of the Unicaf University, Dr Robert Ridley said as a university, they are looking at improving teaching and learning by developing new ways of reaching out to everyone globally without being hindered by distance.
“Unicaf University continues to seek new approaches to teaching and learning by enhancing online learning. “We are hoping to develop a number of programmes as we already offer and hope to offer new online programmes in the coming years. We will hence continue holding virtue lessons to our students as a response from the various pandemics,” he said.
One of the grandaunts, Lumbani Msiska, a Masters Degree holder in Arts and Education who virtually graduated in 2020 said was excited to finally graduate physically.
“Through online learning it gave me an opportunity to concentrate on other things apart from education as I am also a teacher at St Andrews International Primary School in Blantyre,” she said.
Unicaf University opened its doors in Malawi in 2015 and in the past two years, it has been holding virtue graduations due to the COVID-19.
The 2022 graduation event was incorporated by 2020/21 graduands who virtually graduated as one way of adherance to the pandemic.
