The Nigeria University Commission (NUC) has stated that the country is not yet ready for 100 per cent e-learning. Instead, it has called for the country to embrace a blended approach, adding that it is concerned about integrity issues around e-learning in Nigeria.
Suleiman Ramon-Yusuf, a deputy executive secretary of the commission offered this position in Abuja while fielding questions from the press recently.
Ramon-Yusuf said that issues around integrity must be resolved before the country will be able to adopt e-learning on a full scale.
“We want to ensure that when there is e-learning in place, it would be run in such a manner that every student is accounted for, every student has an e-portfolio, which enables everyone to know that it is this student that registered for this course and it is that same student that has been doing the assessment test and the examination; and that learning is taking place in an evidence basis,” Ramon-Yusuf noted.
He said that Nigeria can only handle blended learning at the moment because there are some things that need to be put in place before e-learning can be embraced fully.
“We need to sit down and articulate the requirements for e-learning: materials, men and women, infrastructure; what should we put in place? How should we proceed? We can’t do e-learning today in Nigeria. What we can do is blended learning,” Ramon-Yusuf said.
Attention needs to be paid to the training and retraining of teachers for them to get comfortable with e-learning, he added.
“We need to plan; we need to invest; we need to train. After putting all the infrastructures in place, we need training of teachers. You must get them to have a mind-set shift,” Ramon-Yusuf noted.
Meanwhile, the deputy executive secretary noted that the NUC was reviewing related guidelines to embrace e-learning and to prepare the country’s universities for effective e-learning. He said that the commission will publish new guidelines soon that will embrace the realities of e-learning today.
