BY LAJU IREN

10.5 million Nigerian children are out of school; this is the highest number in the world. For the ones who are in school, the story is not entirely better. According to a recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, Nigeria is one of the countries wasting money on education because many of the children in school are not learning.

The situation is not much better at the tertiary level; while employers complain that many graduates of Nigerian institutions are half baked, there are thousands more that cannot make it through the admission bottleneck.

Two words seem to sum up a significant proportion of the challenges that the Nigerian education system is faced with: access and quality.   Though these challenges seem insurmountable, experts are now turning to Information and Communication Technology, ICT for a solution. Leading this call last weekend was the Vice Chancellor, Covenant University, Prof. Charles Ayo.

According to Ayo, ICT is the panacea for development problems, education inclusive. Expounding on the paper: E-education: Critical impacts on learning and human intelligence, at The Hayford Alile Foundation annual lecture, the Professor of Computer Science said: “There is definitely a need for more universities, so the intervention of private universities is timely.

However, with the issue of inadequate manpower, do you think more universities is the answer? We must look for a solution in Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCS. The Asian tigers started like that. The National Open University of Nigeria, NOUN, for instance, has about 300,000 students. That is a good start and we can improve on that.

Although the students meet physically one in a while, this is much more than any single University can take at once. We may not be switch online totally, so an integrated approach is necessary. Government should be able to sit down, think through, and come up with the best approach for our country.’

The rationale behind e-learning is such that individuals within disparate remote locations can acquire education through the use of ICT.   Digital content, capacity building in training and research, technology and network infrastructure, local capacity and community support are all important features to be considered for this to work effectively.

Apostle Hayford Alile, in whose honour the lecture was held, had this to say: The quality of education in Nigeria is currently very low. If we want to improve on it, it will cost a lot.  That is why we decided that today’s paper will focus on e-education that the only way to cut the cost of quality education. Through Public-Private Partnership, Policies should be put in place to make this possible.

Online education is becoming popular as a way of offering massification of education, but the responsibility for e-education does not fall on government alone. Stakeholders at the lecture spoke on the need for Public-Private Partnership to get things done. This is especially important to accomplish the CU-VC’s vision of a National e- Education Portal.

‘Multiple interfaces of the national e-education portal include Mobile devices, web/internet, video/teleconferencing, SMS, TV/Radio. The goal of a national education portal is to deliver information, curriculum and support materials to the Nigerian schooling community, particularly at the primary and secondary school levels in order to raise the intellectual capacity of the citizenry through multi-media learning. The portal will offer support for both formal and informal education using a variety of multimedia learning paradigms via several ICT platforms such as the internet, mobile devices, television and radio’ said Ayo.

Although this has been done in order climes such as India and South Africa, accomplishing it in Nigeria will be no walk in the park. The same issues of access and quality which the education sector is faced with can also be said of ICT, albeit on a smaller scale. The 10.5 million children who do not have access to school are less likely to have access to the internet.

There is also the challenge of constant supply which ICTs need to succeed. In response to these, Ayo not only calls on government to live up to their responsibilities of providing infrastructure, but hammers on private individuals and organizations to join hands as well. He also reiterates the need to go the mobile way, hence the term m-education. In a world of about 7.3 bn people, there are currently about 6.9 bn mobile lines; although the specifications are still worked out by experts, some learning can take place with those.