Education is an issue I am tremendously passionate about. The correlation between the theme of this conference, Learning Technologies, and my educational and work experiences is rather fortuitous. I can speak authoritatively about the virtues of open learning technologies having used the platform to successfully complete my Ph.D. degree despite work commitments. Also, I served as the Project Lead for the initiative that revived the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in 2001. This assignment entailed working with the World Bank and undertaking study visits to at least 6 Open Universities around the globe. It also involved working with the UNESCO Working Group on Distance Learning and attending international conferences that focused on open learning.
Apart from the role it played in my personal and professional evolution, I have come to associate the underdevelopment of the Nigerian state with its inability to essentially facilitate the harnessing of the critical human mass that will backstop its development plans and objectives. In my little monograph, The Joy of Learning (2010), I had the opportunity to outline the critical connection between learning and national development. Someone once said that “‘Knowledge is power’ is the finest idea ever put into words.” True. But then it is also the most tragic for any nation not to realize. We have toyed with that idea, but we have not yet unlocked its awesome possibilities. We have enormous human resources, but we have not fully tapped into them. Bill Gates once remarked that “A digital nervous system enables a company to do information work with far more efficiency, depth, and creativity.” We can say no less for the development of any nation too.
My current role as the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology has also enriched my experience by giving me unique insights into information and communication technology (ICT) issues at both global and national levels particularly with respect to using ICTs to drive development in areas such as education. My presentation today is therefore partly informed by a combination of these experiences and antecedents.
In the last 15 to 20 years, I have witnessed in amazement the remarkable transformations that have been brought about by ICT. We all daily live these changes which have greatly impacted different sectors of the world economies including financial systems, health care delivery, commerce and trade, weather and traffic management, airline reservations and travel, consumer electronic devices, etc. According to Nicholas Negroponte, a US writer, “Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped. It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.” Today, over 3.2 billion in the world are internet users with over 6 billion cell phone users. In Nigeria alone, there are over 150 million active phone lines for a population of approximately 170 million people. In today’s world, the youths are not only the largest consumers of ICT contents but are also the leading creators of online contents some of which are educational in nature.
In fact, the advent of the mobile devices such as smart phones, phablets, tablets, apps, drones and the rapid rise of the number of mobile phone users and the number of people with Internet access has thrown up more opportunities as well as challenges that affect us all. The advent of the Internet of Everything (IoE) has given rise to aggressive roll out plans by most major Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to ensure that within the next 10 years, every device being used by the human race will be connected to the Internet. With IoE, each device such as cars, microwave ovens, refrigerators, air conditioners, watches, etc. will be designed and built with Internet ready embedded smart chips and sensors. The IoE will clearly make for a much more connected world wherein distances will truly “no longer matter”.
In the midst of all these developments, how is our education system stacking up or leveraging all of these digital technologies? To what extent are students using their expensive smart phones for learning? How many of the lecturers are using social media technologies to connect with these “digital generation” students as part of the teaching process? How will the role of lecturers change with respect to being teachers or facilitators? To what extent do the research projects in our tertiary institutions reflect the technology innovation taking place in Silicon Valley and education innovation taking place in the Boston Axis of the U.S.A? How much of the terabytes of data being generated by these students (using their smart phones) are being captured, analyzed and used for decision making by their respective education institutions? How much of the aforementioned advances are we using as a nation to address the myriad of challenges we are facing in our education system today particularly with respect to insufficient capacity within traditional brick-and-mortar education institutions, shortage of teachers, examination malpractice, cultism and other social ills, historic insufficient funding and projected dwindling resources from falling oil revenues, exorbitant costs of printing and distributing hard copy textbooks, etc. Knowledge is the only meaningful resource today, so says Peter Drucker. And that knowledge is driven by technologies and channeled by nations into myriad of policies and development dynamics in a manner that make for national progress.
There is abundant evidence that education is already taking advantage of some of the emerging digital technologies to support teaching and learning. We can see that from some of the exhibitions at this event. However, we would argue that to truly derive great benefits from the advancement of digital technologies, our education system cannot simply be “enabled” using existing digital technologies as an afterthought. ICT cannot simply be seen as a “support” function for operations such as student testing, managing accounts and finance, admission management, library management, etc. It is our firm belief that there is an urgent need to come up with new and sustainable education models designed for a digital era and the “digital generation” of students. Why? Simple reason: ICT contributes to the general IQ, or better still development quotient (DQ), of any nation through the adequate and appropriate technologizing of its educational frameworks.
These new education models must be designed within the context of an increasingly connected world of digital technologies and social media addicted students. We cannot afford to simply adapt these digital technologies to the existing, and somewhat flawed, education models. In other words, the digital technologies mindset, world view and culture must be an integral part of the design of the new education models being proposed. These technologies, we can say, help facilitate a development-oriented educational system at the speed of thought, to borrow from Bill Gates.
To underscore the importance of coming up with new education models within the context of a new digital world order, let us examine some of the challenges we currently face as a nation. First, there is the issue of insufficient capacity. For example, in 2014, of the over 1.7m students who sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), all the Nigerian universities have only a combined capacity to admit only 520,000 students of these students. Clearly for a country as large as Nigeria, the reality is that the traditional brick-and-mortar academic institutions cannot keep pace with the rate of growth of student populations seeking tertiary education. We need to be looking at alternative forms of offering education to our teeming youth population all yearning to gain admission into tertiary institutions particularly the over 1 m who fail to gain admission despite being qualified for it. A digital technology-based Open Distance Learning is such an alternative worth considering.
Second, the high cost of traditional paper-based textbooks and limited access to learning materials is putting Nigerian students at a major disadvantage compared to their counterparts in other countries. The libraries are not only under-stocked but the few books they carry have to be shared between hundreds of students. This situation is even worse for the larger universities with populations of over 30,000 students per university. Third, there is the issue of inadequate and sometimes totally missing infrastructure such as classrooms, libraries, broadband Internet access, student accommodation, etc. In light of the fact that many of the schools still expect the students to physically attend classes, this state of affairs greatly impedes the quality of education the students get. Fourth, there are other issues such as mismatch between what the students are taught and the knowledge and skills demanded by employers in the market place, cultism and other social ills, cyber crimes, inadequate research output, exam malpractice, and lack of quality and timely data to aid planning and day-to-day decision-making.
Despite all the above challenges, the good news is that advances in digital technologies provide tremendous opportunities for a country such as Nigeria to transform its educational system beyond what was possible just a decade ago. There are a number of factors that are playing to our favour in this regard. First, the culture of using technology for learning and teaching is gradually becoming a standard culture in most tertiary institutions around the world. In fact, there is a large population of Nigerians currently enrolled into long distance post-graduate programs in the United States and United Kingdom. Second, the gradual effort to roll out ICT infrastructure in many of the government owned Universities is helping to prepare the ground for a digital based education model. The increasing level of Internet penetration and the dropping prices of mobile devices especially tablets and phablets will tremendously help remove current infrastructure barriers.
Third, the Federal Government through the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology has focused the last 4 to 5 years driving the adoption of technology across different sectors of the economy, growing the local ICT industry and increasing the capacity of the industry to exploit domestic business opportunities. As part of this effort, the Ministry designed a number of programs all aimed at driving the growth of the local ICT industry. Some of these programs include the National ICT Policy, National Broadband Plan, Nigerian Local Content Development in ICT and the national e-Government Initiative. Also, the enactment of the Cyber security Law has gone a long way to create an enabling environment for cyber activities and engender confidence for Nigerians to increase the level of use of the Internet for productive purposes.
We see these programs as preparing the stage for the innovative exploitation of ICT to drive education particularly Open Distance Learning in Nigeria with respect to learning, teaching, administration and management, research and development, evidence-based policy formulation, augmenting teacher shortage, and fighting exam malpractice and cyber crimes within student communities. Digital technologies such as Social Networks, Mobile Technologies, Big Data Analytics and Cloud Infrastructure and Services (commonly known as SMAC) lend themselves quite well to the new education model proposed earlier.
It is our belief that the above proposed model provides a number of significant advantages. First, it provides for an opportunity for us to incorporate best practices into our educational system, and create a seamless linkage between the knowledge and skills of graduates and expectations of employers in the market place. Second, it addresses the aforementioned challenges particularly with respect to providing alternatives for all those applicants that cannot gain admission into traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. It is our hope that the increased penetration of low cost devices and falling prices of Internet access and widening footprint of broadband Internet access will make it easier to bring high quality education and edutainment contents to many more Nigerian students. We also believe that this widening infrastructure footprint will provide opportunities to those who are already employed but are looking for educational opportunities that fit into their work schedule. Third, the availability of digital records about student population, learning activities, infrastructure statistics, and census type data will provide governments at different levels with education related statistics that has been largely missing in the past due to poor data gathering infrastructure and expensive data gathering culture. Fourth, the model will allow for integration to open market education platforms such as Khan Academy, Udemy, YouTube, etc.
We believe the rich stack of learning contents already offered by the latter will make for a much richer experience for Nigerian learners. And finally, the restructuring of our educational system for a digital era and a digital generation will create tremendous business opportunities for forward looking Nigerian ICT companies. We expect the attendant benefits to also help the current administration achieve its broader goals of diversifying the economy, creating jobs, fighting insecurity and fighting corruption.
If you are sitting in this room today, and you aren’t worried about how we make the marriage between Technology and Education work with a new digital era mindset, then there is a real cause to worry. But whether we are worried or not, we are already on a head-on collision course with a digital future we cannot escape. And the gap between today and that point in the near future may even appear shorter than my time here at UI seems to me. But it is only if we can creatively seize control of the forces that define our lives and define our society can we then truly be prepared to recreate that inevitable digital and developmental future on our own terms.
(Being the keynote address by Dr. Tunji Olaopa, Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Communication Technology at the International Conference and Exhibition on Learning Technologies (ICELET) 2015 in Ibadan recently)
This article was originally published on Thisday