E-learning is the act of learning through digital means, it is used by schools, offices, governments and organizations to train students and workers. The e-learning course is often carried out online, usually through video streaming.
E-learning in Nigeria has proven very useful to the education sector in recent years. This year, with the pandemic that ravaged public spaces and the world, e-learning came to the rescue in time.
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Due to how schools embraced it, it has led to some major improvements in the overall system of education in Nigeria. Now more than ever, schools are embracing e-learning and implementing it, teachers are encouraged to use it and are trained for it, and the government is doing its share to improve the implementation process for e-learning facilities across Nigeria.
In this article, we will be highlighting how schools in Nigeria benefited from e-learning programs in 2020, and how it has affected the standard of education. Top on our list, of course, is how it has helped us fight against coronavirus.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the closure of all schools and other public places, no one can go to work nor students to school. But thankfully, e-learning programs were quickly adopted to fill the void left by the closure of schools.
It gave students the opportunity to keep studying and practicing their schoolwork while out of school.
Although e-learning has been around for quite some time, the pandemic made more schools adopt the technology, mostly because it is the obvious solution to the problem. The Federal Ministry of Education along with other education agencies provided support to schools around the country to ensure that learning activities continued, they broadcasted lessons on TV and radio and also through e-learning platforms.
This consistent effort made it possible for students to learn every day, they learned remotely from the safety of their homes. The elearning platforms enabled learners to communicate with their teachers and with each other, it enabled them to share multimedia files and to submit assignments and to answer quizzes and tests.
It is said that in the face of every adversity there is a blessing, it is true in this case. Nigerian schools benefited from e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, it gave them the opportunity to explore other learning options. In a time of need, it was unanimously agreed this was what schools needed.
E-learning cannot replace the regular classes but it can provide more educational tools for us to use and ease the teachers’ work. Despite being introduced to most schools during the pandemic, most school administrators are holding onto the e-learning platforms even afterward, because they found how versatile it can be and how useful it is.
Education stakeholders in the country realized an opportunity in e-learning and quickly took advantage of it, they invested money and resources into e-learning, making it more accessible to school administrators and learners.
At first, when e-learning in Nigeria was introduced, for many edu-tech companies it was in a beta stage or development stage because of lack of funding and support, it has no users onboard and the market for it was small. But because of the investments made in e-learning, it evolved rather quickly, now, it has more users. Understanding how it works requires little to no effort. E-learning was rapidly developed when there were more stakeholders in the education sector.
They did not only invest in e-learning, but other educational technologies also benefited from investments in 2020. Leading to overall growth in edu-tech in Nigeria.
E-learning was simply one of the pioneering educational technology to pave the way and open doors for investors to realize the potential for other educational technologies. It shone the light on other fields such as robotics and VR/AR.
All of this has led to a healthy competition among the patrons in the education sector, from software developers who make e-learning platforms or SaaS (software as a service), to web developers, shareholders, etc, they are all working in concert to further increase the standard of education in Nigeria.
E-learning is a revolutionary technology, it made it possible for learners to learn at any time of day, from anywhere, and at their own pace. They can learn via video streaming with an instructor or online tutor, they can also learn via video lectures pre-recorded in advance. The video lectures are just as interactive as in a classroom.
One of the benefits of e-learning is it allowed us to embrace technology, e-learning has enabled us to fully extend the use of the technology around us, we have used it to learn, and we have used it to advance our careers and to gain skills.
This has allowed us to be more efficient, more effective in our work and in our everyday life.
E-learning was beneficial to not only education in Nigeria, but to other sectors and industries as well. Other fields such as agriculture, finance and medicine must have had their own breakthroughs while using technology, but most if not all of them employed the use of e-learning platforms nowadays.
They used it to conduct training for their staff, which is more convenient to use than to travel from different states to convene in one location, especially during the outbreak, when travel was stifled. E-learning seemed to be the only other option.
Other uses included gaining monetary skills. Many people used e-learning platforms to acquire skills to help them earn more, both as part-time workers and full-time workers. They were learning to become graphic designers, freelance writers, and in general, online workers. The quarantine period was a major motivator this year, there was an urgent need to upskill, so that you can work from home, thanks to using online e-learning platforms, this was a possibility in 2020.