Managing Partner at GrandCentral Africa, Chinenye Mba-Uzoukwu, discusses the challenges of integrating technology with education in Nigeria and tells OZIOMA UBABUKOH that urgent steps must be taken to bridge the gaps.
One of MTN Foundation’s initiatives is the restructured SchoolsConnect project. In what capacity is Infographic’s contribution to the success of the project?
Through the MTN restructured SchoolsConnect project, we want to demonstrate that technology can be delivered in an affordable manner and in areas that you would normally not expect it to be, and this is critical, without necessarily having access to the Internet. When people talk about e-learning, the assumption is that you must have connectivity. Grandcentro’s framework is called ATTAIN, which we designed to showcase how technology and transform education. It tries to take three core elements or gears that must be enabled to create the possibilities and the potentials for transformation to happen. It deals with Policy, Technology and Capability/Culture and without driving these gears; you can’t get transformation to happen. For a system to move, the engines must be enabled. Implementing technology in schools is like parachuting computer into schools but computers don’t teach on their own as they are like blackboards. We believe that the transformation must start with the teacher – move the teacher from analogue to digital, in this way, we can proliferate access. The teacher is further empowered by creating digital classrooms, like what MTNF is doing. So we can now bring the teacher and the student into an environment that is digital and enable them enjoy the benefits of an enlarged capacity that comes from not doing it analogue anymore. There are simple examples – how do you teach global warming to a child who is in the village who doesn’t have English or the concepts? The only way you can do it is by showing video or animation and exercises linked to that. The teacher must possess the tools and capacity to explain while the student must be able to use the tools themselves to practice and learn.
We believe that policy has to say that every teacher must be digitally literate. If we don’t set this as a policy, then it means we are leaving it to the market to drive that as a goal. The market will only drive it in areas where it is economically viable. They would not go to the villages where there is no network; they will stay in the cities. So, you have to create policy that provides the incentive as well as the targets and aspirations to drive the change that you are looking for. We must change the policy environment to setup a digital teacher. When the policy changes it leverages technology and the wheels begin to turn which moves the lever of capacity, capability and culture.
Under the ATTAIN framework, we can transform a school by providing one computer, one generator and a multimedia projector. If every school in Nigeria has one I-better-pass-my-neighbour generator, a laptop that has eight straight hours of battery life, and a projector, they can download the entire world to any classroom, in Nigeria. We believe that by a massive deployment of technology in education, we can create huge opportunities for the largest number in the fastest possible time. The schools connect project demonstrate the reality. We took the ATTAIN framework, remodelled the schools in our consortium, did the physical works around the project. We built a consortium of partners – made the classroom student-friendly by replacing broken glass, flooring the rooms, putting ceiling fans and cooling systems and we replaced the desks. We created a structure around the desks that was intended to enable the students have better capacity in terms of optimal classroom utilisation. We are going from the model of one computer to one classroom to where everyone has a computer. And this is the trajectory which we have to go through as a country. Some states spend up to twelve billion a year printing textbooks, which end up being used to wrap boli and akara. In India, they have decided that a child must have access to a device. So they developed a product, Aakash; it cost 45 dollars. The government subsidises it by $10 dollars. It is low and doesn’t have beautiful visuals but it does the job. At $35, every student in India can get access to a tablet. Let assume it cost $100, that is N16, 000, you now divide that by N12bn, which is being spent on textbooks, the result shows that if the government were to invest that money every year, for five years, every student in that state will have a device. On that device, would be everything that the student needs to learn and most of it would be for free and without Internet. When you add the layer of Internet and connectivity, you have enriched the environment. And there are local players providing rich e-learning content. When you put it together, you find out that lack of policy that has robbed us of the benefits of leveraging technology in education. People just say, it cannot be done, but truth is: we can fix this mess today, this year.
The MTNF Schools connect programme has given us the opportunity to present our framework and deploy it on a national scale. By this, we are clear that at the end of the first one year, we can actually go and measure its impact as well as understand how technology is landing in different cultures, be sure that ecosystem is accepting of what we are trying to do and we take those learning and continue it. The journey towards transformation has begun. We needed to have a partner who had that belief as to where technology could actually take education as well as the sense of urgency that was involved to get into the programme and MTNF allowed us to demonstrate the framework on that scale.
Having played an advisory role to government on information ecology and strategic IT, how do you think government can replicate the success story of the restructured SchoolsConnect project across public schools in the country?
All over the world, education has been the last industry to be accepting of the transformation that technology brings. It might sound surprising, but many governments today are grappling with how technology lands in education. Education as a formalised institution was created to support economic production. Until economic production changes, education may not necessarily change. Education sits at the foundation but it is largely influenced by what is happening on the super-structure.
One, the challenge is that there is no clarity on the role that education plays and the economic system. To leapfrog the agrarian and industrial and go into the knowledge economy, you have to start from the education system that creates the people who service the system. If you try to build a digital economy without changing the education system, it will fail because globalisation has flattened the borders. So, we need to understand the issues and how to tackle them.
The next element is inertia – we have been this way, we will get there eventually, then it would not work. Will the Nigeria Union of Teacher agree if we say that all teachers must be digitally literate? However, our model recognises this, which is why we have said that all we need is one laptop, one tuke-tuke generator, one projector and we will take the knowledge of the entire world, and we would drop it in your village. No one is thinking like that but this is our radical approach.
The last challenge is ignorance and incompetence. Once the economic system changes, It carries others along and forces them to change their game. There was a time we had a tally number banking system. But the system changed when there was competition at the top and newer banks came into the system and were generating a new culture of excellence. We haven’t had new generation education in Nigeria. They stay ignorant and say that it can’t happen here when we should be thinking, how do we make it happen.
We should be closing down the universities for the kind of things they produce but we are not. Every time you try to hold ASUU accountable, they go on strike and blame it on money. Money doesn’t make a lecturer come back to class every year for ten or twenty years with the same lecture notes.
Lastly, there is a reluctance to face the truth. We built a system that allows us to be hypocrites, so nobody tells the truth. For example, many teachers in the rural areas don’t go to class; they are busy on their farms. If you give capacity to learn to the end user, the student, they will learn. It has been proven that the curiosity in a child will lead him/her to learn.
Investing in education as a Corporate Social Responsibility, what has it been like?
I would like to say to anyone who is interested in investing in education as CSR or as business point of view is to be able to do proper diligence. You must understand clearly, what it is you want to achieve and do the preliminary work of investing to find out who has succeeded, what is working, and then you put your funding into that.
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