‘Digital divide’- what the Nigerian educational system lacks

It was only a matter of time before social media and digital revolution cast an influence on how teaching was delivered in classrooms. From the industrial ages to the age of information technology and now social media age, formal education had metamorphosed too.

In general, the purpose of education is to impact knowledge and make people or group of people behave in a certain way- ‘civilisation’. We could be passing on survival instincts as in ancient education or developing literacy in the form of reading and writing as the case in modern contemporary education. These, so that people behave in the same way.

Covid 19 became a ‘great reset’ for education. A reset that was needed to align teaching delivery methods to the socio-digital age. Has this reset been beneficial now? Yes, in my opinion, but not at the cost of human lives. But for educational systems around the world not to have been prepared for the reset, was unprecedented. A plague that warned of its intending arrival, but higher institutions through to early year establishments were not ready.

People discuss whether Covid 19 did more harm than good, but what cannot be argued is that covid has shown us how to work differently. Before the pandemic, it was unheard of to talk of teaching or delivering lessons or lectures from home. Today as educational settings come to grips with the lessons of the pandemic we begin to talk of hybrid and blended learning, synchronous and asynchronous mode of teaching, as if these terms were new.

As digital literacy takes centre stage of the mode of delivering teaching, I begin to wonder where Mother AFRICA and developing economies are in all of this. Britain and the rest of the world struggled to cope with the demands of living through the digital revolution delivered by this biological agent.

While delivering a project recently, I requested some African teachers to record audio-visual lessons for the project. Only for me to realise that I was asking for a near impossible task. Many of the teachers though extremely knowledgeable in their subjects, didn’t know how to use PowerPoint presentations. They were familiar with lessons predominantly taught on black and white boards using chalk and board markers.  

The apparent digital divide is staggeringly overwhelming. The most incredible thing is that the teachers involved were teachers from private and independent schools. It is my assumption that many schools in Nigeria still languish in primitive teaching facilities, that leaves one with the fear of imagining what facilities are in government publicly funded schools.

Children in Nigeria deserve the best teaching experience. Government and proprietors must do more to provide digital facilities and train teachers to acquire relevant skills. Otherwise, educating children in Nigeria will not prepare them for the digital future they will inherit.   They will live in a world divided by digital technology.