Metasys Wazobia software targets primary, secondary school students

By Emeka Aginam, Asst. Online Editor
At the just concluded Nigerian Computer Society, NCS, Annual General Meeting held recently in Abuja, the International Syst of Brazil in conjunction with Leapsoft Nigeria Ltd presented to the Nigerian IT market Metasys Wazobia that targets educational institutions, especially primary and secondary students.

R-L, Bolaji Onibudo, CEO of Leapsoft, Paulo Neuenschwander Maciel, the President & CEO of International Syst Brazil, at the presention of the new Metasys Wazobia suite during the NCS conference held last wek in Abuja

Metasys Wazobia, is a collection of educational software that allows elementary and secondary students to interact with teachers in a computerized learning environment and provides learning tools on specific subjects such as chemistry and mathematics.

The software also allows teachers and parents to control a students access to the internet, conduct tests, provides a portal full off educational content and an application for monitoring all the computers on a network.

Speaking to Nigerian IT community during the NCS AGM, the Bolaji Onibudo, the CEO of Leapsoft told the capacity audience that , “Their is the need for us to look beyond Universal Basic Education or UBE which seeks to provide all basic requirement for learning based on the 20th century.

“ This is insufficient for the children of the 21st century whose global counterparts are exposed to the Internet through computers”. Furthermore, “We need to realize that in the 21st century the computer is the primary tool for learning just like the pencil of the 20th century.

“Therefore we must influence the policy makers to adopt the new global standard in education, Technology Enabled learning. This implies using simple ICT tools to aid learning in a classroom. The tools may include Computers, Software and access to the internet.

“Implementing TEL in Nigeria will be a big challenging task, and we need to think carefully in a Strategy that leads to proper Planning and Management in order to have success. Time is not on our side, and therefore we should not have to re_invent the wheel in this effort but instead adopt a Leapfrog strategy”, Onibudo said.

According to him, there was need to reduce the steep end of the learning curve by modeling after successful counterparts. “ We have seen how the advent of Open Source has transformed and inspired so many communities around the world to benefit from the abundant of knowledge available and have also been able to contribute to it.

“This is why TEL has been predominately powered by open source has it enabled learning, sharing and contribution to Knowledge at a fraction of the cost of propriety software.

“ At Leapsoft we believe that it is time for Nigeria to become a leader in Africa and the world in adopting and contributing to the body of knowledge out there. Our new product offerings, Metasys Wazobia, were developed with this in mind.

Similarly, the President & CEO of International Syst. Paulo Neuenschwander Maciel, told the gathering that the product has state-of-art technology to support the end users.

“The tools shouldn’t be in the form of a black_box like with propriety software. This tools should be based on Open source so that the students are free to learn the composition of the tools. With open source software the tools are easily localized to aid usage in local languages which helps fulfil digital inclusion” he said