MY E-CLASS INITIATIVE
The following presentations are relevant to students who subscribe to the online arrangement I made through which academic materials of good quality regularly reached their email boxes. For those who are not concerned with, or affected by, this arrangement, the presentations on this page is another source of enlightenment on the forms that certain aspects of my intellectual activities took in the past.
PLEASE NOTE: Following the successful completion of our degree course in Lagos State University on Thursday September 25, 2008, the E-CLASS is now defunct.
All members of the defunct E-CLASS will now be integrated into a larger online social networking arrangement which shall be unveiled soon.
All information about the defunct E-CLASS are retained here with little or no alteration just for the purpose of information about my past activities.
THE MEANING OF E-CLASS
E-CLASS simply means 'class by email'. Thus, it is different from conventional classes in which students physically congregate to receive lectures or tutorials at designated venues. In E-CLASS, students receive relevant materials and other academic instructions - not exactly in the form of lectures, through their email addresses.
Students who benefit from my E-CLASS do so through a simple process of subscription which entails submitting their valid email addresses to me. This process is absolutely free.
Other benefits of E-CLASS includes students receiving urgent information through AJIBOLA-Info[e.g. assignment alerts, especially during holidays], EXCLUSIVE PICTURES, individual materials on request, motivational emails, etc.
The idea of E-CLASS occurred to me in early 2004 and I then started operating it with an initial intake of 91 students from the Department of History and International Studies, Lagos State University[LASU].
As at February 2006, the number of subscribers had risen to 403.
At present, my E-CLASS services is restricted to students of History and International Studies, School of Part-time Studies, Lagos State University, Lagos, Nigeria.
WHY THE E-CLASS?
Inspired by my strong humanitarian drive, I have been pondering since my first year in the university on how to expand and diversify the avenues through which I help my fellow students. As at that time, I have earned a reputaion as an effective tutorial giver: many students were already calling me 'Prof' though I reacted by insisting, apparently unsuccessfully, that I was an average student.
My tutorials were highly patronised, but I soon discovered that the problems of my fellow students go beyond their need for extra explanations on what they learnt in classes. For example, there was the problem of pausity of materials. Lecturers wrote books and gave out materials, but it would be unfair of students to expect them to provide everything.
It was at this point that the idea of E-CLASS occured to me and I started compiling a list of email addresses of fellow students in June 2004.
In July 2004, I sent out my first E-CLASS materials to the first set of 91 E-CLASS students.
THE STRUCTURE OF E-CLASS
At the initial stage, I used to go through the cumbersome process of typing large numbers of email addresses before sending materials, which was time taking.
I solved this problem by evolving what I call 'the Group System'.Therefore, the entire email addresses were broken into groups, each of which I named according to the number of email adresses in them. Hence, I had E-CLASS DATABASE 60, E-CLASS DATABASE 52, E-CLASS DATABASE 90, etc all of which I stored in separate folders.Whenever I wanted to send materials, I will just open a folder, copy the entire group email addresses, paste them in the 'to' box and send.This process is repeated with other groups until my E-CLASS operation is completed.
THE NATURE OF E-CLASS MATERIALS
There are three categories of academic materials I send to E-CLASS students through my E-CLASS.
The first category is that of materials I made myself; the second category is that of materials I edited and refined after browsing them from the internet, and the third category is that of materials I browse from the internet which remain unedited.
E-CLASS students only have to open their email boxes and read or print out such relevant materials instead of going through all the processes of browsing.
THE PROBLEM OF DEFAULTERS
Some E-CLASS students do not check their email boxes over long periods and so such boxes get closed.These are the people that I term 'Defaulters'.
Defaulters create problem for me because my email box is always immediately flooded with notifications of failure delivery which I always have to begin checking and deleting.
However, defaulters constitute a minority of the entire E-CLASS at any point in time.
The implication of being a defaulter is simply that the defaulter misses all the materials I send out during his or her defaulting period.
