The Federal Ministry of Education has inaugurated a Standing Committee on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for the ministry.
Architect Sonny Echono, the Permanent Secretary of the ministry who performed the inauguration in Abuja, stressed the need for the Committee to focus on tackling the issues of low ICT literacy among teachers and students; lack of reliable education data; Out- of -School children; outdated ICT curriculum; poor internet connectivity; inadequate ICT infrastructure, under-utilisation of ICT infrastructure and lack of effective collaboration among the Ministry’s parastatals and agencies.
Echono urged the Committee, which is also responsible for data gathering towards creating a unified Education Database, to make concerted efforts at ensuring the delivery of qualitative evidence-based education in the country.
The Terms of Reference for the Committee include: setting up a digital literacy training standard for the sector; recommending valuable ICT projects that will enhance teaching and learning at tertiary level; coordinate ICT curriculum planning and alignment; make recommendations that will restructure and enable the Nigerian Research and Education Network (NgRen) project to achieve its objectives; utilize the Ministerial Strategic Plan(MSP) as an overall guideline to achieve ICT goals of the Ministry.
The Committee is to work out modalities to tackle the numerous ICT-related challenges of the education sector and remove the obstacles to the establishment of ‘proper ICT projects in the sector’.
Alhaji Abubakar Isah, the Committee Chairman and Director of the ICT department of the Ministry, tasked the Committee members to evolve strategies to improve digital literacy, build the capacity of teachers as well as solve the issues of inadequate and under-utilisation of ICT resources in the education sector.
Abubakar said ministry personnel must embrace the enormous advantages offered by ICT facilities in order to change ‘our way of doing things’ especially migrating from analogue to digital procedures with guarantees of rapid and accurate results.
He emphasized that with ICT the era of painful, tedious travels for data gathering is over, adding that data from sites can now be collected and transmitted real time to any part of the world without having to travel to site. Abubakar maintained that the resistance to ICT by government personnel is causing the Federal Government enormous finances which can easily be deployed to other areas of need.
