Making use of the technology at hand to meet learners needs in Osun State, Nigeria

Professor Temitope Eniola is a Professor of Microbiology at Joseph Ayo Babalola University in Osun State, Nigeria. He holds various professional offices at national and international levels, and has to manage significant travel alongside his teaching responsibilities.

Prof. Eniola has been teaching microbiology and biological science for 30 years and has always sought to deploy the technology of the time to make his teaching more engaging and appealing to his learners. In the early 2000s, he used Yahoo Geocities (a hosting platform) to upload content, but eventually the platform was taken down and he reverted to sending his materials in PDF format directly to students’ mailboxes.

He creates his teaching material in digital formats, using tools that are available to him. He started sharing his lecture notes via Google Drive because of the limitations imposed by the size of attachments that could be sent through email, and in 2017 moved on to Google Classroom. He believes that it is important to infuse local content in the digital materials that lecturers create, which requires that they create their content and do not just rely on open and freely available resources. He uses Zoom so that he is more present as a teacher.

Prof. Eniola travels regularly, so digital learning ensures he can continue his teaching alongside his other professional commitments.

The advent of Covid-19 didn’t affect his teaching activities since was already actively using digital tools. He encourages colleagues to adopt the use of technology to support their teaching.

Prof. Eniola describes innovation as using the resources available to solve problems, rather than necessarily creating something new. For this reason, he sees the use of social media tools for learning as an innovative approach, because it allows lecturers to meet students in environments that are familiar to them and at their own terms.

Following his prompting, the university has now adopted Google Classroom as an institutional learning platform. He tries to encourage his colleagues to explore digital tools, helping them to understand what can be achieved in cost-effective ways, using resources already available to them at the university — such as the Google for Education suite of tools — and offering training in particular tools.

To ensure that content is quality assured, the institutional publication committee oversees the quality of learning resources that are developed by staff and provided to students. This is a standing policy, in place before the digital shift.

The fact that the university has good internet access and power supply is helpful, and an institutional policy that requires that course material be prepared for every course and be evaluated properly before being released to students has been an important enabler.

In recent years, the Nigerian Universities Commission has also been supportive, exposing open and distance learning directors to a training programme facilitated by the University of London.

Access to good quality hardware can sometimes be a problem, as is the lack of more systematic training for academics in technology use. At a national level, Prof. Eniola feels that improvements to infrastructure, better training and incentives for academics to create content, and stronger policies to guide e-learning are needed.

Interview conducted by Oluchi Okere, Federal University of Technology, Akure.