NBTE, Commonwealth of Learning partner to strengthen TVET training

The National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) says it has signed an agreement with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) on design and development of Open Educational Resources (OER) courseware.

This is contained in a statement by the NBTE’s Head of Media Unit, Mrs Fatimah Abubakar in Kaduna on Tuesday.

She said the goal was to strengthen the delivery of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET).

The spokesperson described OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials that may be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared by anyone.”

Abubakar said that COL, the world’s inter-governmental organisation was solely concerned with the promotion and development of distance education and open learning.

She added that being a creation of the Commonwealth Heads of Government, COL encouraged the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources, and technologies.

She said the partnership would improve the capacity of both NBTE staff and lecturers in polytechnics.

According to her, the measure is to facilitate blended learning across Nigerian polytechnics and related institutions.

The NBTE, she said, already set up a Technical Team to design and develop 13 OER courseware for Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBETA) using Open, Distance and Flexible e-Learning (ODFeL) approaches.

She added that under the project, 33 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) support staff would be trained on Moodle Administration.

She said the ICT support staff would be expected to provide technical and multimedia support to the course design, development, quality assurance and delivery teams.

The head of the media unit added that the institutions with approval to run ODFeL would select 66 participants to design and develop the 13 OER courseware.

“Furthermore, 99 lecturers will be trained as assessors, internal verifiers of the 13 OER courseware using Open Distant Learning methods from ODFeL approved institutions.

“At the end of the training, 426 lecturers will be trained on blended TVET delivery using COL’s OER courses.

“These include introduction to blended TVET, essential skills for TVET, facilitating online courses, and blended learning in the classroom among others,” she said.