Opeyemi Adelere
The Federal Ministry of Education has partnered two e-learning platforms; schoolgate.ng and mobileclassroom.com.ng, to provide data-free access to educational content for primary and secondary school pupils forced to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The schoolgate.ng caters for primary school content while the mobileclassroom.com.ng provides secondary school content in line with the national curriculum.
Speaking on the initiative, Obafela Bank-Olemoh, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Education Interventions, said the websites can be accessed data-free from devices subscribed to major telecommunication companies’ internet packages, noting that Airtel subscribers are already accessing the educational content on the site free-of-charge.
“Due to the nationwide closure of schools to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, these portals offer free subscription to students in primary and secondary education levels during this period.
“There are content for other education levels including Vocational education on the portals but primary and secondary education is prioritised for free access for now.
“Understanding that aside from free subscription to the portals, students will also need data subscription for internet services to browse. So we engaged Telcos to provide data free access to the sites.
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“So far, Airtel Nigeria has given their subscribers free access while other networks including MTN, Glo and 9Mobile should roll out theirs this week.
“All that is required to access the portal is an internet enabled device, that is, Phone, tablet, iPad or computer However, users must keep their mobile data enabled on the device,” Bank-Olemoh said.
The Chief Executive Officer of mobileclassroom.com.ng, Mr. Salami Akeem, said his firm had since lockdown made content subscription free for secondary school students, adding that their involvement with FME exponentially increased the number of pupils accessing his firm’s educational videos, as a result of data-free access offer of the government.
“At the beginning of the lockdown we declared the platform free. Since the Federal Government was seeking a way to provide e-learning free to students, they collaborated with us seeing that we had already declared our content free.
“To make it at zero-cost to the students, they initiated discussion with the network providers to provide free data access.
“In less than one month that we declared our content free, we recorded almost 100,000 views on our videos. So we are expecting more with this collaboration. We will provide the free content while the pandemic lasts. But we are hoping the Federal Government will be willing to extend the collaboration beyond this time,” he said.
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