Open Learning Network

Image CC-BY Natalie Eggleston, OLnet

Name

Dele Yaya

Project Title

Sustainable and Successful Use of OER in the Programmes of the National Teachers’ Institute, Nigeria

Project Summary

This project aimed at establishing the process of transforming NTI course materials into OER. NTI has been producing massive course materials in print and CDs since its inception in 1976. The institute has been integrating TESSA OER into the course books and continuing professional development (CPD) materials. However, there is a need to increase and sustain this integration so that teachers and other stakeholders can easily access the materials and repurpose for their use.  Already existing print and CD resources require to be transformed into OER materials. Users (i.e. primary school teachers) need to be supported to access and utilise OER in a sustainable manner. It is against this background that the project was designed.

The overarching project aim was to design a roadmap for this transformation. To achieve this aim, the following four key questions guided the investigation:

• Why should NTI share her materials for free through OERs?
• What NTI materials should be transformed into OERs and how?
• What copyright, funding and other logistical issues need to be surmounted in transforming NTI materials into OERs?
• What can NTI learn from the OU (OpenLearn) and from OER literature?

Dates visited the UK

15 to 27 May 2011

Institution

National Teachers’ Institute (NTI), Kaduna, Nigeria

Biographical information

Dele is the Deputy Director in charge of Planning, Research and Statistics and the TESSA Project Coordinator at NTI. He trained in teacher education with a specialisation in distance education and later did his PhD in educational technology. He has a long career at NTI where he has been a course writer for education and social studies and later state and zonal coordinator for the Institute’s distance education program at field centres before taking up his current administrative position. He is also the chairman of the implementation committee for the nation-wide Capacity Building Program for Teachers (under the Millennium Development Goals Project) which has annual week-long workshops with attendance rate of 120,000-140,000 teachers. Additionally, he is the NTI’s Desk Officer for the Joint Consultative Committee on Education (JCCE), a national policy making body on education matters.

His research interest is in open and distance education focusing on raising awareness around the use of OER. He is keen on ICT literacy, as he puts it: “because you cannot access OER online if you are not ICT literate”. He has been studying the processes other institutions have adopted in developing their OER so that NTI can learn from them for its own OER development process.

Dele has been involved in the TESSA project since 2009 when he participated in the Teacher Education at Maximum Scale (TEAMS) project. He has been part of the team that integrated TESSA materials in NTI courses and has been involved in the trial of these materials in the field. Additionally, he was part of the team that developed the TESSA handbook in a meeting in South Africa.

Main output

A roadmap for transforming NTI course materials into OER has been developed and it will be presented to the NTI management.

Other outputs

Presentation at DETA pre-conference workshop

References

Yaya, Dele (2011). Opening access to teacher education materials: Experience of the National Teachers’ Institute. In: DETA pre-conference workshop, 3-5 August, 2011, Maputo, Mozambique.

DETA pre-conference workshop

Dele attended this workshop and made a presentation titled “Opening access to teacher education materials: experience of the NTI”. This gave him the opportunity to talk about his project of transforming NTI course materials into OER. In his presentation, he highlighted the range of OER course materials, made a justification for why NTI is going this route and what this involves.
Some of the sessions were particularly informative. For example he found the demonstration of how to search for OER from the internet very useful. He states

“...maybe you have a topic and you want to get materials for it, there are millions of materials on the net. To be able to search and get those that are relevant to your course can be a challenge. This is one area that [presenter] helped us”.

The workshop also provided him with valuable insights from how others on the continent go about overcoming common challenges they encounter in adopting OER such as problems with access to technology, connectivity and power supply. It was also a time to meet fellow academics who he has interacted with previously.

Update since fellowship

Dele has been involved in a number of OER related activities. In the first place, he has now completed his project and developed the roadmap for transforming NTI course materials into OER. He is in the process of finalising his fellowship report. In the process of his project, he identified that the level of digital literacy among NTI staff and policy makers is quite low. Because of this, print format is still very prevalent. Poor internet connectivity does not help this situation.

He has also been working with his colleagues to create OER awareness at institutional and national levels, which according to him is a huge achievement. He notes that people are generally very excited about OER and are interested in using them. For example he has used his position as the NTI’s representative at the Joint Consultative Committee on education (JCCE). With his colleagues they have presented a memo entitled “promoting the use of OER for quality HE delivery” which was well received. The outcome of this is that very specific statements about integrating OER into the tertiary education will be made during the next meeting of the National Council on Education where ministers and commissioners ratify decisions of the JCCE. 

NTI has a radio station “The Teachers’ Radio” which offers a range of educational programmes to support schools, teachers and parents around Kaduna and future plans are to expand its coverage. Besides broadcasting TESSA audio programmes such as the “TESSA Teasers” and “Story Story” series, Dele and his TESSA team have been using this service to create awareness of OER and how they can be used.

Dele has also been actively involved in supporting the NTI Staff Primary School as a TESSA Demonstration School. This is a primary school that was opened on 29th November, 1984 as a welfare scheme for the staff of the Institute and is thus located on the campus of the Institute. As part of the Embedding and Extending TESSA project in Nigeria, the school is one of the strands of the project. The goal is to support the teachers in making good use of TESSA methodology. Dele has been using the skills he has acquired in the course of the fellowship towards supporting the school to act as a good testing ground for assessing the awareness, access, use and evaluation of TESSA OER and other relevant OER.

Text extracted from pre-publication draft of report by Pauline Ngimwa, "Achieving impact in Africa through openness: OLnet TESSA Fellowships", March 2012. Full details of this publication will be available on this website when available.