Fiji’s first-ever Virtual Open Day hosted by the Fiji National University has been praised by secondary school students and teachers. The Virtual Open Day comes to a close this evening with more than 90 secondary schools and around 1500 individuals participating during the week-long event.
FNU’s Director Marketing and Communication Jenies Mudiliar said the online delivery of the Open Day was planned and executed without any major challenges and achieved the University’s goal of providing potential students important information regarding study opportunities offered by Fiji’s national university.
“We are grateful to the Ministry of Education, Heritage and Arts (MEHA) for their approval and the participation by all the schools across the country in this important annual event,” said Mudiliar.
“We have received positive reviews from schools and we will continue to work with the schools through MEHA to ensure all students are well-informed about the wide range of programmes we offer as well as other important information such as minimum entry requirements for the relevant programmes.”
As part of the Open Day, short videos of all the FNU Colleges were uploaded on its website, together with key information regarding study programmes, fee payments, library services and student life services.
Three live chat sessions per day were scheduled for the entire week, which enabled potential students to ask questions regarding study areas of interest. FNU academic experts were on hand to answer all enquiries during the live interactive sessions.
“This is the first time that any tertiary institution has done this in Fiji and we are proud to pioneer this initiative and ensure that all Fijian students are well informed on the various academic pathways available to them. We plan to expand on this in the coming years as it enabled our secondary schools which are geographically dispersed to participate in the Open Day as well. We had some schools who had attended an Open Day for the first time as they were unable to come down to the Universities previously due to logistical challenges, and that was very rewarding to us,” Mudiliar commented.
Year 13 student of Bulileka Sanatan College, Jithasha Doreen described the Virtual Open Day as ‘user-friendly’ as she was able to obtain needful information on the application process from the comfort of the computer lab in school.
“We spent three hours watching all the College videos which provided us with an idea on how things work out at a University level. Students had queries pertaining to the subject area they are interested in. We are content with the response we received,” she said.
Doreen hopes to join FNU’s College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences (CMNHS) next year.
“Following an interactive session and a fruitful discussion with the academic staff through an online chat, I now have all the information on how I can apply at CMNHS,” she said.
FNU’s College of Humanities and Education, Executive Officer Nasivan Ali has been actively involved in responding to queries throughout the week and said she is thrilled with the overwhelming response received from the users.
“A lot of students and the general public reached out to us through our online platforms; website, text platform and social media. We noticed that these students were very interactive when it came to obtaining more information on programme structure, fee, minimum entry requirements etc whereas on a normal Open Day we had only a handful students who used to ask questions,” said Ali.
Given the present gathering and social distancing measures currently in place, FNU conducted this year’s open day virtually so that the potential students are not deprived of the information they need to make the important career choices.
The FNU Virtual Open Day page remains will remain live for the rest of the year and can be accessed on www.fnu.ac.fj/openday