The MTN Foundation, in partnership with SAIL Innovation Lab and Co-Creation Hub, has concluded a training session for educators across Nigeria as part of its ongoing 12-week digital skills teachers training programme.

Established in collaboration with the Senator Abiru Innovation Lab (SAIL), the initiative is designed to equip classroom teachers with artificial intelligence tools and skills to improve teaching and learning outcomes in the 21st Century.

Facilitating the programme’s 10th week, a data scientist and business analyst at Data Science Nigeria, Oluwatobi Olayanju, led a virtual session focused on AI literacy, responsible technology use, and practical integration of AI into lesson delivery.

The training engaged educators from across Nigeria who have been participating in the series since its inception, with a focus on such skills as 2D animation, cloud-based note-taking, advanced AI-powered lesson planning, and content creation.

The programme is the latest in a series of corporate-led education interventions in Nigeria, which the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says is characterised by a critical education bottleneck, with over 10.2 million primary school-aged children out of school, the highest number in the world.

Olayanju led the participants on a broad ecosystem of AI tools available to educators, including chatbots for lesson planning, visual design platforms, text-to-video and text-to-audio converters, as well as assessment generators.

He also introduced participants to ditchthattextbook.com, which he described as “a centralised repository that aggregates these essential resources,” and which is dedicated to helping educators discover and apply modern digital tools in their practice.

According to him, “educators can leverage these tools for visual design, lesson planning, and content creation. The capabilities extend to advanced multimedia integration, such as converting text to video or audio and generating podcasts with tools like NotebookLM.

“These features are designed to captivate students and foster a more engaging and immersive learning environment.”

Meanwhile, on behalf of Co-Creation Hub, Joy Medupin, who manages the training arm of the programme, said the energy among the participants was remarkable, with the organisers upbeat that the training was on course to produce a cohort of educators fully equipped to teach and assess in an AI-integrated environment.