Digital learning is gaining prominence across the globe amid the coronavirus pandemic that has forced closure of traditional schools, but government-owned universities in Nigeria are finding that they are ill-prepared for the shift.
Larry Dignan, editor in chief of ZDNet and editorial director of TechRepublic, in a March 22, 2020 article for Between the Lines, said, “It is online learning’s big moment and education is about to be revamped just as much the industries that are going to remote work due to the novel coronavirus.”
Privately-owned universities in Nigeria have embraced this “big moment”, but not so for most federal and state universities across the six-geo-political zones who are battling with lack of basic infrastructure for online learning, ASUU strike, among other challenges.
Amid the disruption in traditional learning occasioned by closure of lecture halls, Adamu Adamu, Nigeria’s minister of education had, through teleconferencing with all vice-chancellors, provosts and rectors of tertiary institutions in the country, directed the tertiary institutions to move to online learning with immediate effect.
But over a month after, most public universities say they are awaiting the directive from the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to call off the strike they embarked on since March 23 over the Federal Government’s decision to withhold the February salary of their members who refused to enrol on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS). Only Kaduna State University, Lagos State University, First Technical University in Ibadan and Coal City University in Enugu are public tertiary institutions that have keyed into the online classes, a check by BusinessDay shows.
Maurice Onyiriuka, a lecturer in one of the state universities, acknowledged that online education is the only viable option to minimise academic losses to students, but said universities’ lecturers who are supposed to upload their lecture notes online are still on strike.
“Except the lecturers call off their strike, there isn’t going to be any semblance of online teaching at 95 percent of the public universities,” Onyiriuka said.
He said even when the strike is called off, there is no infrastructure in place to ensure the smooth migration to online learning as federal and state universities still grapple with electricity, lack of digital devices such as smartphones, laptops, data to drive the process, and majority of the lecturers are not technology-savvy and need to be retrained to flow with the new normal. The sudden shift to digital learning amid the coronavirus crisis has posed some challenges to public tertiary education system as majority of students do not have their own computers or internet facilities.
Onyiriuka lamented past inaction by the universities’ managers and successive governments to convert the entire Nigerian public education system to digital.
“We should have developed a comprehensive online education system for the universities and tested that much before the spread of the coronavirus,” he told BusinessDay.
But private universities, including Pan Atlantic University in Lagos, Anchor University in Lagos, McPherson University in Ogun State, Covenant University in Otta, among others, have soldiered on, developing online and distance education systems in response to the disruption of traditional mode of learning.
Last Friday, Pan Atlantic University in Lagos announced that every student of the institution would from Monday, May 11, receive a gift of 3 gigabytes of data a week in compassionate support to access lectures as the university declared its intention to march on with online tutorials in the wake of uncertainty around COVID-19.
Juan Manuel Elegido, vice chancellor, announced the decision of the institution to continue online instruction for the remainder of the 2019/2020 academic year as well as the 2020/2021 session that it hopes to commence in October 2020. He said the school would “teach, learn, collaborate and work online” in the days ahead.
Joseph Olaseinde Afolayan, vice-chancellor, Anchor University, said the prolonged lockdown provided the university with the option to administer classes online. He said the university would go ahead despite many challenges to having seamless virtual classes such as poor infrastructure.
“I know there will be a couple of hitches as we commence but as classes continue, both students and lecturers will adjust and we will have very productive sessions learning online,” Afolayan said.
Ayodeji Adesina, assistant public relations officer, McPherson University, said the university management acted proactively by approving the commencement of online lectures in response to the coronavirus pandemic which forced tertiary institutions to close their academic doors.
In a telephone chat with BusinessDay, Adesina said the migration from brick and mortar to online classes was smooth and easy for its academic staff as they have been trained and retrained to keep abreast of changing phase of Edu-technologies and have been experimenting with same.
“Our students, in particular, were enthusiastic about the idea and they have been maximising the various platforms the lecturers are using for lecturing on a weekly basis,” he said.
National Universities Commission (NUC) data show that only 87 of Nigeria’s 170 universities are able to offer up to 24-hour Wi-Fi service which, in the period of online learning, is key.
According to the data, universities owned by private entities in Nigeria are the ones able to provide internet access to their staff and students 24 hours daily with 58.6 percent of them able to do so. They are followed by federal universities where 58.1 percent could offer internet service for 24 hours, while only 38.6 percent of state universities are able to offer 24-hour daily internet service.
Onyiriuka said the outbreak of coronavirus has widened the disparity between private universities and their federal and state counterparts as well as their ability to migrate to online learning.
Reacting to the disparity in migration to online learning, Isaac Adeyemi, former vice-chancellor, Bells University in Otta, Ogun State, said the government’s approach to the online migration has not been encouraging.
“The federal and state governments are really not serious about the way they are handling this online migration for universities. How can they want public universities to move without getting ICT providers to offer their tools and platforms at little or no cost to enable them to reach millions of their ‘marginalised’ students?” he asked.
