Valedictory Speech

Niño Ismael Pastor
August 26, 2006
10th UPOU Commencement Exercises

(Niño Ismael Pastor is a public health specialist in applied epidemiology at the Department of Health (DOH), National Center for Disease Prevention and Control. He took the Diploma in Research and Development Management (DR&DM) program under the Faculty of Management and Development Studies. He got the highest graded weight average (GWA) this year.)

A very pleasant day to you all, today, we are honored by meeting in one place our faculty, classmates, school officials and staff for the first time, today we will also officially see each other for the last time. This is the day we will graduate. Let me say how wonderful it is to be physically near you for the first and last time.

For the last two years, we witnessed the most unique feature of distance learning: it’s ubiquity. And in the University of the Philippines Open University, it is a prerequisite to achieve the highest quality standard in distance learning. As distance learners we practice being everywhere, we work while we also study. To a distance learner, this is not a simple act of scheduling our studies between our work, but more importantly it required relational skills in one’s mind and behavior everywhere in time or place. Our work helped us learn better from our modules and at the same time our modules and lessons helped us to perform better in our work. I am sure you have your own experiences about this. Let me relate to you how I personally experienced this form of ubiquity that distinguishes us from traditional learners.

I was attending a seminar held in the hinterlands of Mindanao and while waiting for the participants to arrive, I decided to open our modules to beat a deadline for a faculty-marked assignment. Now, this seminar was conducted to identify problems confronting a program in my own organization, the participants later on, identified several problems like lack of funds, lack of manpower, among those that I remembered. I was dumbfounded for two reasons, they were the same problems predicted in our text I read just a few minutes earlier. But they were the usual problems, the more important problem was not mentioned by any of the participants, our lessons identified it as a problem that had to do with the mind set or paradigms of key players in the program. Knowing this on the spot gave me ideas as a panelist during that seminar so, I had more than enough to say from the reader. But I had to stop. I had to stop not because I ran out of pages to read. But because you could hear a pin drop and the ladies were beginning to shed silent tears. Their reaction took me by surprise, I was talking to a group of doctors and nurses about how our present paradigm for persons with disabilities deny the basic rights and services that belong to the differently abled persons.

The impact of that seminar was the result of being a distance learner. We stay at work yet ubiquitously use our studies immediately. And this I believe will secure the quality of our future as we leave the portals of our beloved institution. We had acquired multi-tasking skills in a multiple environment to become part of a growing elite force of homeschoolers that will change the dominant assumptions and characteristics of traditional institutions well neigh into the next millennium.

There is also another form of ubiquity that we had acquired as distance learners. Being isolated from our classmates, faculty, and, staff. We managed to maintain our school performance. That lack of physical contact did not deter us but rather it challenged us to define our own culture of learning that enhanced our performance instead, we gave meaning to our studies and our work to compensate for this lack of physical presence. We decided to become ubiquitous active learners instead of relying on the usual social cues from a traditional classroom environment. The lack of physical contact did not deter us from maintaining our own version of virtual values. Coming from every where on the globe we as members of this graduating batch may have our own personal stories about this. Mine happened like this,

I had to go home, home where the internet cafes played games most often than being online, I became offline at a time when a group assignment had to be submitted, I told my group mates to go ahead to avoid submitting late, but they did not, they preferred to sustain the consequences of being late instead, Spider. Dong. Tere. Am glad to meet you for the first time. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. But this human value of group cohesion was not just among our classmates. I volunteered to submit the faculty-marked assignment (FMA) myself since I was causing the delay, normally our FICS were supposed to refuse the FMA, but they accepted our FMAS with penalties of course. This cultural attribute displayed the quality of the character of distance learners and their faculty in our beloved institution. Ma’am Jeng, Dr. Cuyno. In behalf of the group who opted to wait thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

I cannot say to you how wonderful the last two years were, how much we had achieved, how flexible the online programs were, how meaningful the culture that we had defined for ourselves and how much we are looking forward to leave the virtual portals of our prestigious institution, I need to say that it was and then say more, the University of the Philippines Open University is everything it said it was and but it is more.

Thank you all (Faculties-in-Charge) FICs who had to unclutter our website and align our discussions back to the topic, they who had to spend sleepless nights correcting our FMAS and examinations. Thank you learning center coordinators, computer technicians, drivers, and other staff who made sure that we had a learning environment operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week for the last two years and made us connected on time inspite of ourselves. Thanks to all the university officials and staff who manage and keep managing our university inspite of dwindling resources. Thanks to our wives, children, loved ones and relatives for their tolerance. Thanks to our parents for their inspiration, Thanks to all those who made this day a reality.

May god bless us all,
Happy graduation day,
Thank you and
Have a nice day.