Since the lockdown began, government at various levels have had to implement policies to ensure learning continues while schools are closed. Five education commissioners in the Southwest shared their efforts with parents and educators. KOFOWOWOROLA BELO-OSAGIE reports.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a learning curve for all areas of human endeavour. In the education sector, public and private administrators of schools have had to learn alternative ways of achieving similar objectives that were not an issue in the pre-COVID era.
From running lessons on radio, television and online and providing digital learning devices to training teachers to teach remotely and providing data-free platforms, states are working in partnership with the private sector to deliver education to millions of learners at the various levels of education.
Five commissioners for Education in the Southwest states, Mrs. Folasade Adefisayo of Lagos, Prof. Sidi Osho of Ogun, Foluso Daramola of Ekiti, Olasukanmi Olaleye of Oyo and Jamiu Olawunmi, the Special Adviser to the Osun State Governor on Education, shared with parents and educators what their governments have been doing to keep learning going while schools remain physically closed because of the pandemic on Sunday, during a webinar anchored by founder of the Concerned Parents and educators Network, Mrs. Yinka Ogunde.
Oyo – school on air and online; plans for post-COVID emergency management
In Oyo State, Olaleye said the government has deployed education content through state-owned radio and television stations for consumption of students at the primary and secondary school levels.
“Since the month of March, Oyo State has developed a lot of programmes. It includes school on air – using radio and television through which we started lectures using some educational content both in video and audio form. We partnered with a number of companies that have these materials. We have been airing on the radio and television owned by the state,” he said.
Conscious of the challenges posed by electricity and other factors that may make learners miss the broadcast lessons, Olaleye said the lessons were also available online on the state’s educational management system for students to access data-free if they are signed on to Airtel.
“We have what we call educational management information system in the Ministry of Education in Oyo State on our website. We have deployed textbooks in 14 subjects, self-assessment questions, and we also have e-classrooms where we have videos. So for our students, if you don’t have access to television, radio, you must be able to go online. We also realised some students will not be able to afford data.
“We have entered into partnership with Airtel. Through Airtel, our students can have access to the websites and use up to 500MB every day when on this site,” he said.
To avoid a re-occurrence of the lack of preparedness that greeted the education sector because of the pandemic, Olaleye said the Ministry of Education was developing a policy to manage education during emergencies.
“We set up a committee to draft education in emergency response plan. It is not only to take care of this situation but prepare for the future. The essence is to deploy technology on permanent basis in schools so that in future, even on weekends learning can continue in all our schools,” he said.
Lagos – using radio, TV, WhatsApp, smart devices to deliver education
With less than five per cent of the pupils in its 1,600 public primary and secondary schools lacking access to digital devices for e-learning, Mrs. Adefisayo said the state had to deploy radio and television to reach a large number while using WhatsApp and physical learning packages to get feedback from learners to assess how they were learning.
She said: “We realised that less than five per cent of our students have devices with which to go online. We thought about doing WhatsApp but we found that a bit more had access to WhatsApp enabled phones. What had the greatest appeal was radio and television.
“To reinforce what is happening on radio, our teachers are having WhatsApp groups with their students and sending question papers and marking them and sending them back. For those who don’t have WhatsApp our Quality Assurance and Curriculum units are working on learning packets and we should start sening them out from next week. We load questions on WhatsApp but also print and deliver to the children at home.”
Mrs. Adefisayo said the state had partnered three radio stations, Eko FM, Naija FM, and Wazobia FM to air educational content at specific times daily. She added that the content are delivered by public school teachers who were specially trained for the purpose, and private organisation, Sahara Development Organisation, which had large resources for junior secondary school level.
“We started with examination classes but we have expanded to other classes and would start broadcast on Monday. The interactive radio instruction is handled by our teachers; while for the JSS content we patterned with Sahara Development organisation which had a lot of material on JSS which they have been warehousing for years.”
However, despite these efforts, Mrs. Adefisayo said the government found that many pupils did not have access to radio and smart devices and so would be providing 300,000 radios and one million smart devices to pupils.
“We have embarked on a drive to buy about 300,000 pieces of transistor radios so all children can get access to one device or the other. We have partnered with a bank – we wanted to work together to get the public to help purchase one million devices for these children. We have got some of these devices pre-loaded with the curriculum, books, quizzes and a little window with which they can exchange correspondence with their teachers. One of the telcos- MTN – has given us six months data access,” she said.
Mrs. Adefisayo also said teachers were being trained in digital education delivery by Microsoft, as well as radio/television presentation and others.
Ekiti – school on air, post-COVID funding of education
Like other states, Daramola said Ekiti has its school on air programme on radio and television – with the recordings also available online. He also said select teachers,who would in turn train others, were being trained in digital education delivery by Northumbria University.
“We did a programme for both basic education and secondary education on our key subjects. Basic education goes for 30 minutes for each subject. We also have a programme for secondary schools. That of secondary school, we have one hour per day.
“We are not stopping at the students; we also have a programme for our teachers. We had discussion with Northumbria University on the training of our students. We have recently completed the training of the first batch of 16 teachers through Zoom,” he said.
Considering the crash in oil prices and its effect on education funding, and the disruption of the school calendar because of the pandemic, Daramola said the state was researching into how it would run the education system without issues in future.
“I inaugurated three committees in all. One is to help us to look into how to adjust our calendar. And the other one is looking at our free education programme because we are looking at the fact that our crude oil is not being sold now and we are expecting no revenue from the federation account so what are we going to do to ensure we still fund those schools. The third committee is looking at adopting a school project to look at alternative financing for free education. The tree committee are rounding up. So that will enable us to prepare for post-COVID-19,” he said.
Ogun – used international online resources, learned from private schools
Prof. Osho said the state initially plugged into resources shared by the Federal Government in the wake of the lockdown occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The Federal Government released to us a report of a task team on learning at home programme to ensure children continue to learn.They gave us online reources that support primary, secondary and tertiary learning. They include mobile classrooms, see saw and we have made that available to parents.
“We have launched a programme called Ogun Digital Class – a remote learning platform using television stations to ensure learning continuity. We had to train our teachers and timetable came out every week on the subjects that would air.”
Prof. Osho also said the state learned from what private schools were doing to continue learning – the platforms and the devices used.
With parents having to step in as emergency teachers, Prof. Osho said the state had provided training modules to help them navigate this role.
“Parents have to be trained too because parents take over the role of teachers at home. We are providing online opportunity for training for parents to key and educate themselves because they are now stepping in to train their children,” she said.
Osun – prepared before hand
Osun State seemed prepared for COVID-19 as the Special Adviser on Education, Jamiu Olawunmi, said it already had a system in place for radio/television and digital learning inherited from the Rauf Aregbesola administration.
He said: “The administration of Mr. Gboyega Oyetola inherited about almost a paperless education system in terms of teaching and learning. Since 2012 Osun State had introduced digital training; digital classes through Opon Imo. Our students were already exposed through the tablets though it could not go round we have been able to improvise.
“We tapped into the capacity of the computer centre of the Obafemi Awolowo University where we started the website training. When COVID-19 came it was not a big challenge. We had all public schools and private schools registered on the state’s cloud education management system. The result of what we have now is improving on our school on air which has been in existence since 2012,” he said.
In concludnig the session, the Moderator, Mrs. Ogunde praised the efforts of all the states in addressing issues thrown up by the COVID-19. She however said there was a need for synergy between the public and private sectors to make for greater success.
“You would be amazed at the quality of teachers in private schools. Why don’t we have the best of both worlds? We appeal to the commissioners is to find a way of merging both worlds,” she said.
Leave a Reply