In what would appear yet another first for the Afe Babalola University Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), the National Instruments (NI) Inc., a Texas, United States firm with a tentacle in South Africa, will soon establish a LabVIEW Academy in ABUAD.
On take-off, the academy will be the first and only Centre of Excellence where ABUAD Engineering undergraduates and their peers from other universities in Nigeria would be trained, tested and awarded the industry-recognised Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer (CLAD) certificate, a world-wide recognised industry certification.
Speaking at the closing of a two-week train-the-trainers workshop for 50 workers in the College of Engineering, the Provost of the college, Prof. Israel Owolabi, said the establishment of the academy is an integral part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by the university and NI.
He said: “The training is unique in a number of ways. One significant aspect is the acquisition of value-added programmes to enhance the students’ Bachelor’s degree (B. Eng) certificates after graduation, thus making them employable in the global marketplace.”
Besides, he said the training is in tandem with the vision and mission of the Founder, Aare Afe Babalola, (SAN), to produce highly skilled, socially and globally relevant graduates capable of applying scientific and engineering knowledge to solve societal problems.
“The training has just been undertaken by our engineering staff to make them effective instructors on the equipment purchased by the university from the NI’s train-the-trainers scheme,” he added.
National Instruments Inc. is a world renowned manufacturer of educational lab virtual instrumentation suite (NI ELVIS),. It integrates a dozen most commonly used test and measurement lab instruments, such as oscilloscope, function generators, spectrum analysers, variable power supplies, and digital multi meters, among others for design and implementation of laboratory experiments in automation, mechatronics, instrumentation and control systems, using the highly intuitive LabVIEW programming environment.
According to Owolabi, with NI ELVIS package and a laptop, a student can easily design and perform various projects and experiments in all areas of engineering, at any place and time without having to be within the physical laboratory environment.
ABUAD had earlier signed an MoU with the company for the supply of modern electronic equipment with the purchase agreement involving after-sales training of staff on the effective use of the equipment. The trained staff would in turn train the students on the effective and efficient use of the sophisticated modern electronic equipment.
In his remarks, Aare Babalola said the university, which parades an army of highly talented professionals, is moving at a rate than he had contemplated.
His words: “We have started well, we have arrived and we are going up and up and up.”