‘Open Education Resources will boost online studies’

ONLINE education in Nigeria is witnessing an exponential increase, as more students will now have access to unlimited educational resources online, so says business operations manager of EduPlatforms, Mr. Femi Obidare. 

 EduPlatforms, an arm of Emerging Platforms, is in partnership with the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) to create platforms and develop information technology (IT) solutions that would ensure seamless access to online resources for NOUN students across Nigeria.

  Obidare spoke at a sensitisation workshop organised by the NOUN in concert with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), to train NOUN facilitators on Open Education Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) project. The OER project is an initiative designed to facilitate and enhance digital education across the globe.

  According to Obidare, “EduPlatforms is proud of this partnership, to provide digitalised contents and broadcast to different NOUN learning centres, using our online facilities. Nigeria is definitely witnessing a positive revolution in digital education. The OER project has been designed to bridge education gap in the country and to offer quality education content for NOUN,” Obidare revealed.

  Eduplatforms is a technology solutions provider and operator that is committed to revolutionising the delivery of education capacity building in Africa, with a mission to identify problems, leverage technology in creating massively impactful solutions in the education space. 

  “Our vision is to become an enduring platform for transforming lives and creating value by delivering innovative educational solutions in Africa,” Obidare stated.

  The essence of the OER is to ensure that every NOUN student gets the best of online education through prompt delivery of educational materials online and to facilitate online interaction between students and their lecturers through the iLearn programme. 

“iLearn is an end-to-end turnkey solution that provides world class e-learning services to open and distance learning institutions, which spans the deployment of administration portals, learning management services, instructional design, multimedia content production and support services. iLearn can be customised to suit institutions’ unique needs and business processes making it the perfect e-learning solution,” Obidare explained.

  Head of OER and MOOCs project, NOUN, Dr. Jane-Frances Agbu, while explaining the rational behind the school signing up the project said it was part of the institution’s drive to keep pace with global trend in delivering quality education, through the online platforms.

  “Youths now are described as the “digital natives” and they prefer online materials. As an open and distance learning institution, we are well positioned to key into this philosophy of OER and MOOCs because we have a lot of materials and professionals around the world that our esteemed students can tap into to get quality resources. We are confident that we can contribute that socio-educational ability to Nigeria, opening up learning content to humanity,” Agbu explained.

 UNESCO programme specialist on OER, Mr. Abel Caine, in his remarks said the organisation was committed to its mission of ensuring access to qualitative education across the globe, made easier with greater access to online educational facilities.

  “We are here in Nigeria to sensitise Nigerians on OERs, which are online learning materials released under the open intellectual property license, allowing free-of-cost and legal reuse, revision, remixing, redistribution and shared in digital formats.  Through the workshop, UNESCO is able to transfer a lot of educational skills and knowledge to facilitators and educate them on how to use digitalised contents in impacting knowledge online. NOUN is investing in the digital content and UNESCO is supporting NOUN to achieve the dream, to improve the quality of education the institution offers,” Caine said.