As most schools, including nursery, primary, secondary and higher institutions, resume across the nation this January, there are fears of further and faster spread of COVID-19 virus due to the likely non-adherence to protocols prescribed by the Presidential Task Force (PTF) and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
Parents and guardians are beginning to develop fears because they are not fully convinced that, their wards will be protected against COVID-19 outside their homes. The school authorities have, however, assured parents that they have what it takes to safely handle all pupils and students in their care. Some of them are even boasting of special testing kits.
Many private schools have made COVID 19 test mandatory. Nonetheless, the most important thing that is needed in schools today might not even revolve around the issue of testing, but the monitoring of health conditions of the students in their environments, which should happen every single day. If testing is introduced on Monday, would the authority also test the students on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday? Because they come to school and mingle with other students and their teachers every single day.
How can schools identify early symptoms in a student or pupil who had come in contact with someone elsewhere who is COVID 19 positive? Are they going to test al students again on the second day considering the 30 thousand Naira per test charge by most private school authorities? Testing daily or even weekly is quite impracticable. So school authorities must look for a better way out, and that has to do with technology.
Information technology and digital technology are game changers in this present age. The school authority should be able to capture data, aggregate such data, analyse it, to help government and health regulators make smart decision on vital health issues.
All over the country today, various schools and other organisations take daily temperature reading, but what happens to it afterwards? They are never aggregated for each individual to know when there is a major or slight change. Analyzing This would be the earliest external indicator of any one who may have contacted Covid-19 along the line. Each school should get the software that can aggregate the temperature of every child and spotlight promptly any remarkable change. With some efforts this can be done.
There are indeed many other fundamental things academic institutions and government should have utilized this lacuna to fix if everyone had the drive tin making every efforts to relentlessly pursue excellence.
Top on the list is e-learning. With the lingering pandemic, need to reduce physical contacts and encourage students and teachers to use computers to enhance the learning process. The students will do the learning at home and come to school intermittently for clarifications and answers where they have difficulties.
It’s quite disturbing that Nigeria does not have a clear online learning policy for her expanding school population. Even with well over a hundred million Nigerians that are in school state and federal ministries of Education have not issued guidelines for schools to expand.
India for example, about seven years ago, took the decision to make radical changes in their educational system. They decided that they are developing online education for all, beginning with tertiary institutions. They look at various devices and decided that they will come up with their home-grown device for all.
An iPad that cost between 400 to 600 rupees per unit was proposed. They eventually decided that, they will produce an iPad that will cost less than the benchmark amount. They did a design and took it to China, built it and brought it back to their country. Then, IT in India was not as developed as it is today. The government subsidized it by 50% and every student in India got the device at about half the cost
Today that device has gone into proper circulation because their government continued to invest in their local manufacturers to improve on the quality of that same device. So, after six years, they now have a device that can compete with any other tablet in the market. And guess what? They are still selling this device at a very low cost.
Nigeria has over a hundred million young people in her educational system and the country is presently facing onslaught from multiple fronts from COVID 19. Then why can’t we replicate this after staying at home for months during the lengthy lockdown?
There are countries that have used education to change their world.. A country like Finland with a population of just over 4 million people tried it with huge success. In 1992 to 1993, they decided to skew their education towards the developmental stride they wanted. Finland established Polytechnics everywhere to impact technical knowledge that equipped its citizens to create a top-notch technical work force. And that is why they are doing so well in the areas of science and technology today. Some of the big tech companies in the world such as Nokia among others are based in Finland.
Finland has had 35 years of unbroken effective technical education programme. Infarct, the educational system of Finland is anchored in the constitution. No government that comes to power and change that policy by executive fiat. So, they have their education intact with about 99.99% enrolment, with or without COVID 19.
The best time for re-engineering is when there are massive dislocations. Nigeria should have used the COVID 19 dislocations to re-engineer her entire educational system. One hopes that opportunity is not lost.
Another challenging area in Nigeria’s educational system is the curriculum that needs more regular overhauling. If Nigeria is to inject full use of computers and software into her e-learning programme, a few key things must happen. One; all the teachers must learn how to effectively operate computers and have a good knowledge of software operations as well. Two; the teachers must accept the fact that they will become publishers of content. This means, instead of always using already made contents, anytime a teacher creates a lesson plan, it becomes a new content. And that will lead to a surge in software development in Nigeria
In the same way, the curriculum itself will be gradually changing. But what is obtainable right now is that, most school departments, virtually at all levels, are using curriculum that are archaic and quite obsolete.
For Nigeria to achieve remarkable lift in growth, there must be a lot more fluidity and agility in its education system. You cannot have that without massively introducing technology into the equation. The current challenges from COVID 19 pandemic offers the country that unique opportunity to start now.
