ABSTRACT
Education for all in Nigeria has been a nightmare especially for Nomads that wander around with their cattles and sheep in search of food. With the advent of Information and Communication Technology, it could now be easy for the Nomads to get educated. ICT based Distant Teaching and Learning as proposed below will help in that direction. Nomadic Education was signed into law few years ago in Nigeria. This is where classroom is moved around with the Fulani cattle men, women and children where ever they go to. These people stay mostly in the bushes far away from people and civilization. It was very difficult to find the right teachers for the right subjects to teach in these isolated and very difficult conditioned environment. This paper is set to profer solution to all these problems with the introduction and use of Information and Telecommunication Technology for a very efficient and cost effective Distant Teaching and Learning for these Nomads.
Keywords: Information and Telecommunication Technologies, Nomadic Education, Distance Teaching and Learning, computer Assisted Instruction,.
INTRODUCTION
The impact of Telecommunications and Computers in teaching and learning activities at all levels of education is considerable and the extent of use is is increasing rapidly. New and improved uses emerge every day. ICT based Distant Teaching and Learning technology has helped countries with very difficult weather conditions to offer education all year round. Students can now take classes from the comforts of their homes in snowy and hilly and very difficult terrain. In Canada, this has helped the education authority a lot. In Nigeria, Nomads move from North to South, from East to West in search of food for their cattles all year round. This makes it very difficult to educate them. They move with their families, the very old, the wives, the children and even the babies. How would they be trained if they move from one place to another without a defined period of stay? This is the problem and this is what this paper is set out to provide. Nomadic Education implementation using ICT.
WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS?
The technology needed to achieve this objective is already in place. Computers are every where now, Wireless telecommunication is also readily available, Internet is already available, even though it is still expensive, multimedia applications are now cheap, experts to setup and man the project are also not in short supply. Computer Assisted Teaching and Learning technology have been extensively improved on. So, the tools needed for the project are easily available.
PROCEDURE
This ICT based Nomadic Education Distant Learning and Teaching procedure should be designed in a way that the Nomadic students should find the assistance to be: responsive to their needs, patient and not punitive while they learn; it must be accurate in assessment of answers and problem solutions; individualized in a useful way; must be realistic in the presentation of training or testing situations; and helpful with many information processing tasks. The Teachers should find it valuable for keeping accurate records, summarizing data, projecting Nomad Learning difficulties, assembling individualized tests, and retrieving information about films or other learning resources online and real time. Figure 1 shows the organizational relationship between the students, lecturers and the ICT Nomadic based distant learning education.
THE WORKINGS
For effective control and uniformity and cost effectiveness, there must be a control and command center situated in a central place in Nigeria with a good telecommunication infrastructure and ready availability of ICT experts that will be preparing the lectures and procedures. Enugu is an ideal place for this control post.
Responsibilities of the control post:
The head office of the ICT Nomadic based distant Teaching and Learning Education will be responsible for the control and management of all the aspects of this activities. The central computers, the central telecomputing facilities, The wireless telecommunication central hub. The broadcasting studio will all be placed there.
The experts that prepare the lessons, that control the movements of the lecturers and responsibility for the payment of salaries for the lecturer are concentrated in this head office. The head of this office must be a highly qualified and a professional interested in ICT based education. It must be an educationist that has technology bias. The interim organigram of the head office is as shown in fig 2.
Technical Details:
The main trust of the ICT Nomadic Education lies in the application of efficient and effective telecommunication system that is married to the best of Information Technology utilizing multimedia and internet. A pictorial diagram of a typical network is as shown below:
Figure 2. Organigram – ICT Based Nomadic Education in Nigeria