TERAS (Tertiary Education Research and Application Systems) was unveiled by the Federal Minister of Education, Professor Tahir Mamman, on 17th October 2023. While officially unveiling and launching the new technology of TERAS, the honorable minister promised to provide beneficiary institutions and TETFund with unwavering support to fully realize the potential of TERAS as a key component of our resolve in repositioning, strengthening, and rekindling hope in the tertiary education sector. He implored the end users to utilize them diligently for the advancement of tertiary education in the country.

Federal Ministry of Education - Confernce Room
Tuesday, 17th October 2023

Following the implementation of the Thesis Digitization Program, the Fund allocated more funding towards strengthening the role technology plays in elevating beneficiary institutions, the Fund adopted various technologies under the TERAS platform to deliver services directly to students, staff, and institutions.

1. Beneficiary Identity Management Service - BIMS
2. Aggregated Reseach Journals - EBSO
3. Consolidated Library Application Platform - CLAP
4. Sponsored Mobile Data for Staff and Students
5. Communication Skills
6. Blackboard eLearning Enchacements

TERAS originated from the Thesis Digitization Project. TETFund initiated the Digitization of Thesis Project in December 2021, tasking the Fund with shepherding a centralized mechanism that will serve as the basis for storing dematerialized academic output in electronic form, federated across all beneficiary institutions of the Fund. The Fund conducted various interactive sessions and surveys over a period of 9 months to identify how academic output in the form of theses and other digital resources, produced by undergraduate and postgraduate students, is stored, handled, and utilized. The report of those engagements showed, through comparative analysis of practices and approaches, that our beneficiary institutions lag significantly in two key areas:

1. There is a lack of properly structured digitized theses available for integration into global digital repositories.
2. The absence of a National Academic Research Repository or a coordinated collection of individual, institutional repositories.

Undoubtedly, some beneficiaries have made significant progress in digitizing academic output. However, regrettably, the vast majority of beneficiaries—approximately 80%—have not yet started or achieved significant results. Meanwhile, about 10% have successfully digitized a considerable volume of their theses.