Recently, the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), played host to a large number of staff of the department of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) from various beneficiary tertiary institutions across the country, who gathered at the Fund’s Abuja office for a two-day capacity building on ICT essential skills.
Welcoming his guests, the Executive Secretary, TETFund, Sonny Echono, recalled that from earlier presentations and the Fund’s policy roadmap, it has remained committed to sustaining current efforts at digitalization of systems, processes and academic content as well as ensuring that digital literacy is continuously being developed at its beneficiary institutions in the country.
The ES further pledged the determination of the Fund to bridging the digital skills gap in beneficiary institutions so as to enable them produce graduates that are globally competitive, innovative and entrepreneurial minded in attitude.
He added that given the rising significance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) across diverse sectors including education, the initiative holds immense potentials to positively impact educators, students and the overall advancement of educational landscape.
On converged Services: The ES said: “As we continue to grapple with lean resources given the increase in the number of enlisted beneficiary institutions and student population, converged services have become pertinent to accelerate and improve the usage of Information and Communication Technology to advance the reach of teaching, learning and research in our beneficiary institutions and in the country at large.
“Convergent ICT services are centrally arranged ICT Services implemented to address complex but common problems identified from the diverse needs of our beneficiary institutions ranging from capacity development, internet access availability, electronic journals and databases subscription among other shared educational services.”
“These needs have been identified primarily from our beneficiary institutions through the following mechanisms.
a. Impact assessments and surveys.
b. Virtual interactive sessions are conducted periodically throughout the year.
c. Recommendations from the ICT related Committees set up by the Fund comprising heads of institutions, librarians, DICTS from our beneficiary institutions, regulatory stakeholders, and industry experts.”
The ES admitted that it was becoming pertinent for the Fund to consolidate its ICT intervention and spending by provisioning for convergent ICT services for several inherent benefits including the economics of scale and the cost savings achievable in aggregated and converged services, given the great cost savings to the Federal Government at highly discounted rates.
“The availability of the converged services will ensure unlimited access to a target population of at least, two million users inclusive of students, teaching and non-teaching staff of our 253 beneficiary institutions presently.
“In addition to the above, state-owned beneficiary institutions will have all year-round access as federal owned beneficiary institutions to the Converged ICT Services irrespective of receiving allocation or not in that year.
“Converged Services will provide standardization and increased collaboration within and across our tertiary institutions”, the ES said.
Note that converged services is a policy thrust of the Federal Ministry of Education’s National Policy on ICT in Education, which is aimed at establishing and sustaining a common ICT Infrastructure platform for education at all levels.
Consequently, the identified converged services for implementation in 2023 include communication and essential ICT skills capacity development.
“Given the success of the ICDL productivity skills capacity building, the need for further capacity building in communication and ICT skills enhancement has been identified. This capacity building will target both staff and students to improve their productivity and equip them with the essential skills necessary for our increasing digital economy”, the E.S said.
Some of the identified skills include: “Anthology (blackboard) Online eLearning Enhancements.” Echono stated that this has become necessary to standardize the online learning management landscape of beneficiary institutions.
Inherent benefits of this approach include, creating a nationwide center of excellence in digital learning to enable and certify thousands of teachers, and access to a worldwide community of over 4000 institutions and best practices amongst other educational benefits.
“TETFund is an early convert in this digital journey. Thus, we developed our ICT roadmap in 2015 with the 2016-2018 ICT Support Intervention; we gave guidelines for ICDL training and certification for digital literacy. That intervention resulted in over 19,000 staff of our institutions being trained and certified in various digital literacy skills. That was the first step.
“In 2019-2020 ICT Support Intervention, we gave guidelines for eLearning and training on eLearning methodologies for hybrid modes of learning given the advent of the COVID Pandemic and its attendant consequence.
“For 2021-2022 ICT Support Intervention, we gave guidelines for establishment of ICDL Accredited Test Centers (ATC). That is yet another step in the direction of establishing pedestals for deepening the digital literacy curve in our BIs.
“Today’s event is another deliberate step in demonstrating our commitment to enhancing digital literacy by upscaling sensitization, adoption, proficiency in use, and integration of ICT in our core mandates and operations”, Arc Echono stated.
Participants at the training were taken through interactive and enriching sessions that gave them an overview of the communications skill capacity development for students and essential ICT skills capacity development for ICT staff respectively.
