Friday 1 May 2020

FG OPENS CLASSROOMS ONLINE AS COVID-19 PALLIATIVES FOR NIGERIAN STUDENTS


  By M. O. Shutti-Jimoh

THE Federal Ministry of Education has has engaged two existing e-learning platforms to roll out the online classroom promised by the Federal Government in the wake of COVID-19 Lockdown.
      It is a data free access to the teaching of school subjects works to primary and secondary school students via their internet enabled device such as hand phone, tablet, iPad or computer.
     It would be recalled that at one of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) regular update briefing on COVID-19 pandemic response actions a few weeks back, the Minister of State for Education appeared as a guest to state the Federal Government’s plans to sustain exposure of school age children to continuous learning while school remain closed for the period of this pandemic challenge.
      In recent information received from the Ministry by Civics Journal, it was revealed that primary and secondary school pupils are now free to resume online classes when they login to websites at www.schoolgate.ng for primary schools and www.mobileclassroom.com.ng for Secondary schools.
     The Senior Special Adviser to the President on Education, Obafela Bank-Olemo also gave additional insight to the scheme. He said even though primary and secondary education is prioritized for the online classroom, other levels such as vocational education also made part of the contents.
      He said: “Due to the nation-wide closure of schools to curb the spread of COVID-19 Pandemic, the Federal Government has opened e-learning portals for learning to continue unaffected. These portals offer free subscription to students in Primary and Secondary levels during the period.
     “There are also content for other education levels, including vocational education, on the portal; but primary and secondary is (SIC) prioritized for free access for now.
       “Understanding that apart from free subscription to the portals students will also need data subscription for internet service to browse; so we engage Telecos to provide data free access to the sites”.
     “So far, Airtel Nigeria has given their subscribers free access while other networks, including MTN, Glo and 9mobile; should roll out theirs this week.
      “All that is required to access the portals is an internet enabled device, that is: phone, tablet, iPad or computer. However, users must keep their mobile data enabled on the device”.
      Civics Journal also established that the e-learning program adopted a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to roll out. The purported e-learning sites are existing private-owned educational platforms which the Federal Government decided to key into for the mobile classrooms.
      The portal for the secondary school level, mobileclassroom.com.ng, is managed by Mr. Salami Akeem. He said the Federal Ministry of Education extended hands of fellowship to his IT Firm and the partnership resulted to the data-free access to its e-learning platform.
      He also added that his firm had earlier decided to use the platform to provide its own style of COVID-19 palliative in the area of education before FME lashed onto it.
      He explained thus: “At the beginning of the lockdown, we declared the platform free. Since the Federal Government was seeking a way to provide e-learning free to students, they collaborated with us; seeing that we had already declared our contents free. To make it a zero cost to students, they initiated discussions with the network providers to provide free data access”.
       He also explained that it was an initiative with mutual benefits to his firm and the government. According to him, it had expanded traffic to his website within a short term and that was sure to expose his e-learning platform to a wider scale in the nearest future.
      He said: “In less than one month that we declared our content free, we recorded almost 100,000 views on our videos. So we are expecting more with this collaboration. We will provide the free content while the pandemic lasts, but we are hoping the Federal Government will be willing to extend this collaboration beyond this time”.