The Africa Centre of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning (ACETEL) has held a virtual meeting with a partner from The Learning Space, an ICT capacity building company that seeks to partner with ACETEL to offer short-course programmes for the students of the Centre.
Dr. Adewale Adesina, ACETEL Short Course Coordinator and Mr. Chidi Nwankwo, ACETEL Team Lead, were present at the meeting, held on Friday, August 25th 2023 to listen to the presentation.
Mr. Kabiru Mohammed Aliyu, from The Learning Space, while speaking, gave an overview of courses his company intends to offer, and the learning management solution platform, to show the capabilities the company has to facilitate the learning experience.
He said The Learning Space has sent in proposal to ACETEL and that the course it proposes to offer is Cloud Computing and Process Automation.
“We come with a lot of IT deployment knowledge, practical knowledge, grounded knowledge, that we can transition to the people doing the courses, and what we are saying is that from day one (1) after they have finished the course, they can actually start applying their knowledge.”
“Cloud Computing is a broad area and it powers everything that we do now in terms of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Anything that we want to do, be it a small business, to run a store, an online business, whatever we want to do the application is quite wide, and having that grounded knowledge in terms of understanding what infrastructure as a service means, what platform as a service means, what software as a service means, what the differentiator of those things are and if you are taking differentiator as a service, what are you responsible for, what do you need to take care of or what will the platform take care of.”
“When we look at Cloud Computing, we want to bring the knowledge from a short course perspective, the practical use of Cloud Computing, so we are not going to focus on theory alone, we are also going to go into various labs, we have various environments that we are going to take the learners through.”
Speaking on Process Automation Aliyu said “The experience we are going to bring into this Short-Course Programme is going to be amazing, the participants will have access to do actual automation development for the use case, we are planning to use Microsoft Power Automate as a platform and also process maker as a platform, process maker as of today is currently being used in GTBank to process loan applications, it’s currently being used in ACCESS Bank, ANSAR MANSAR, these are being used by enterprise and these can go for millions of dollars to implement.”
“There’s a lot of automation template we can cover within that period just to ground that, and the participants will be confident and be able to automate.”
“The principle of automation is that you want to become very efficient in how you are able to respond to business requirements, so that you can make more revenue, you can reduce your cost and then you can prevent yourself from any litigation or statutory penalty that you would probably incur if you don’t follow a process consistently.”
“We are willing to expand the courses and make it more advanced because we have to start from the introduction and take it to the intermediate level and also to the advanced level.”
He stated further that the courses will be delivered via a virtual structure led and a self-pace session where participants can take all the materials at their own pace, supported by the virtual instructor led session.
“The LMS as well can be accessed from your mobile device or from your tablet, they have the app, and even if you don’t have data, you are able to use the LMS platform without data, that is after you have downloaded the initial content, but if you are doing your assignment, you can do your assignment and submit but with the use of data.” he said.
Aliyu, stating that he and his team understand the requirements of the university with regards to short course programme, said after getting approval the platform will be structured according to the guidelines of the short course programme.
Ms. Nelly also from The Learning Space, gave a demonstration of the company’s Learning Management Solution (LMS), she said the solution is used all over the world, and has top ranking every year on the learning management solutions.
In her presentation she said while using the LSM platform the facilitator will be able to see only the courses that they are lecturing on and the students will be able to see only the courses that they are enrolled in.
“This platform can be accessed by different users, it can be accessed by an administrator, it can also be accessed by teachers, and it can be accessed by students.”
She explained how the platform can be used and navigated by users.
Dr. Adewale Adesina, ACETEL’s, while commenting that the presentation is in line with the mandate of ACETEL, in terms of building capacity, said approval from the university is also needed to be able to run the courses.
He said, though the Centre is satisfied with the proposal presented by The Learning Space, he urged them to also present proposals for the two courses that will be delivered to participants, for ratification before the general approval and signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
He called the attention of the partners to the need for marketing the courses to users and to the public.
Adesina added that the Centre would prefer few courses that are rich in content than having so many courses without impact.