By Rosemary Ogbonnaya
In a bid to accelerate easy learning delivery in Nigeria, the Federal Government has developed and launched two e-learning platforms as baseline model in basic, secondary and tertiary education.
Launching this in Abuja on Tuesday, the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu said the e- learning platforms initiated and developed by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with technical partners as a baseline model to support teachers as frontline workers, investment in skills and narrowing digital divide.
He said the free e- learning websites would mitigate adverse effects orchestrated by COVID- 19 on education as a critical sector in the society.
Newsdiaryonline learnt that the two e- learning platforms are Inspire for learners and Ignite for teachers and educators.
“I have the great pleasure of introducing 2 e-learning platforms; Inspire for learners and Ignite for teachers and educators as free, curated and collaborative access econtent models,” he said.
Represented by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Arc. Sonny Echono, the Minister said the
advent of COVID-19 heralded a new normal – compelling a rethink and acceleration of strategies in alternative means of delivering learning.
He said the Federal Ministry of Education developed a COVID-19 Education Sector Strategy and updated its online Portal for sharing of resources across the country.
This, he said, has enabled other States to adapt and develop their state-specific strategies and provide messaging on prevention and containment of COVID 19 as well as using radio and TV to broadcast lessons.
Explaining further, Adamu said
Education Ministry had started its Education Cloud Project which was in its infancy stage before the pandemic struck at the beginning of 2020.
Speaking further, he said the project is designed to provide a unified approach to e-learning by providing access to high quality, certified content.
It is also designed, according to him, to provide a comprehensive education sector data portal that is verifiable and accessible online from across the nation by learners, teachers, researchers and other stakeholders covering the three tiers of the education sector.
Adamu said the effort was led by the Ministry’s ICT Department, with the cooperation of other departments and agencies under the supervision of the ministry.
Speaking further he said, “As part of the eCloud Project and Inspire, the Ministry has so far produced the following content:
4,000 video lessons for basic level
7,000 video lessons for secondary level
4,000 audio lessons for secondary level
Working with Galaxy Backbone, the ICT Department has reserved 20TB of server space for the eCloud Project. Most of this will be allocated to econtent and another component of the eCloud, the Open Education Data Project launched in 2020.
” Inspire comes with a partner platform that is teacher-specific called Ignite. The Ignite Platform is an initiative to help educators put lesson plans together, learn, collaborate and share material easily. It shares login authentication with Inspire – a single sign on on either platform recognizes the educator on both platforms,” he explained.
According to him, to ensure quality and veracity, only TRCN registered teachers will be allowed to register, by including a TRCN number requirement during the registration process.
He added that Ignite seeks to empower educators with ready tools, a knowledge base and much needed material, templates and formats that will enable better learning delivery in a more agile, productive, and efficient way, bringing the best out of teachers.
The Minister said that, to sustain these notable achievements, the Federal Ministry of Education has put in place strategies to work with stakeholders in the sector to ensure not only sustainability, but growth of the system through the following:
The development of content is a continuous progress and will proceed as a process to enrich the repository, being a major objective of the eCloud Project.
He therefore disclosed that ICT Department in collaboration with United Nations Children’s Fund,UNICEF, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, UNESCO are working to come up with draft policies for digital learning, which will finally be presented to the Nigeria C certificate in Education, NCE for approval.
“The entire world was taken by surprise by the Covid-19 Pandemic which recently clocked 2 full years. The implementation of these e-learning initiatives is timely. We hope their presentation as baseline models will grow the edtech sector in Nigeria through the efforts of the FME and partners,” he said.
