One of the early concerns of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) under the leadership of Sonny Echono was how to bridge the digital skill gaps existing among staff of benefiting tertiary institutions in Nigeria. He had felt that with the educational system’s technical and sectoral skill gaps, it would be difficult for the country to produce enough skilled manpower to service its over 200 million population.
He also felt worried about the existing mismatch between the skills required by employers in the digital world and the skills possessed by graduates produced across the country. This situation was further exacerbated by the fact that some teaching, non-teaching and other management staff lacked digital skills.
“We will do our best to bridge that gap. If we succeed in equipping students with digital skills, they will become more marketable in a digital-driven job market, increasing their chances of employability and career success. For our educators, we will equip them with the essential skills training necessary to provide technical support to ICT platforms and infrastructure. We will also train students and other staff in our institution on digital literacy, using those platforms”, Echono had said.
So, in a swift move to address the challenge, he hosted staff of the various Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) departments from beneficiary institutions across the country to a two-day capacity building on ICT essential skills. Welcoming them to the training programme, Echono recalled that the Fund has remained committed to sustaining current efforts at digitalisation of systems, processes and academic content to ensure sustained development of digital literacy across schools.
The initiative was also aimed at equipping institutions with the capacity to produce graduates who are globally competitive, innovative, and entrepreneurial-minded. Giving the rising significance of ICT across diverse sectors of the economy, including education, the Executive Secretary (ES) said the initiative held immense potential for educators, students and even non-academic staff of universities.
Despite lean resources, therefore, considering the increase in the number of enlisted beneficiary institutions and students’ population, the ES said that converged services have become pertinent to accelerate improvement in the use of ICT to advance teaching, learning and research capacities in beneficiary institutions and the country at large.
“Convergent ICT Services are centrally arranged ICT Services implemented to address complex but common problems identified from the diverse needs of our beneficiary institutions ranging from capacity development, internet access availability, electronic journals and databases subscription among other shared educational services.”
The needs for Convergent ICT Service, Echono said, were identified primarily from the beneficiary institutions through impact assessments and surveys and recommendations from the ICT-related committees set up by the Fund, comprising heads of institutions, librarians, industry experts and other stakeholders.
The ES admitted that it was becoming increasingly pertinent for the Fund to consolidate its ICT intervention by provisioning for convergent ICT services for several inherent benefits, including the economies of scale and the cost savings achievable in aggregated and converged services, given the significant cost savings to the federal government at highly discounted rates.
“The availability of the converged services will ensure unlimited access to a target population of at least two million users, inclusive of students, teaching and non-teaching staff of our beneficiary institutions presently. “Converged Services will also provide standardisation and increased collaboration within and across our tertiary institutions”, the ES said.
Converged Services is a policy thrust of the Federal Ministry of Education’s National Policy on ICT in Education, which was aimed at establishing and sustaining a common ICT Infrastructure platform for education at all levels. Consequently, the identified converged services for implementation in 2023 included communication and essential ICT skills capacity development. Some identified skills included Anthology (Blackboard), Online Learning Enhancements. Echono stated that it was necessary to standardise beneficiary institutions’ online learning management landscape.
Some of the inherent benefits of the approach include creating a nationwide centre of excellence in digital learning to enable and certify thousands of teachers to have access to a worldwide community of over 4000 institutions.
“TETFund is an early convert in this digital journey. Thus, we developed our ICT roadmap in 2015 with the 2016 to 2018 ICT Support Intervention. We gave guidelines for ICDL training and certification for digital literacy. That intervention resulted in over 19,000 staff of our institutions being trained and certified in various digital literacy skills. That was the first step.
“In 2019-2020 ICT Support Intervention, we gave guidelines for eLearning and training on eLearning methodologies for hybrid modes of learning, given the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant consequences. For the 2021-2022 ICT Support Intervention, we gave guidelines for the establishment of ICDL Accredited Test Centres (ATC). That is yet another step toward establishing pedestals for deepening the digital literacy curve in our BIs.
“Today’s event is another deliberate step in demonstrating our commitment to enhancing digital literacy by upscaling sensitization, adoption, proficiency in use, and integration of ICT in our core mandates and operations”, Echono stated.
Participants at the training were taken through interactive and enriching sessions that gave them an overview of the communications skill capacity development for students and essential ICT skills capacity development for ICT staff,f respectively. It has been almost one year since the opportunity was extended to beneficiaries, and there is no doubt that the Fund may have gradually achieved its training objectives.
