Teknoids

My travels took me to the Abuja campus which is the largest of the four campuses of the Nigerian Law School. There are 1600 students enrolled here and the picture above shows just about all of them.

Because the room is so big, I took three pictures and stitched together. If you click on the picture (or here), you can see a larger version.

I can't imagine teaching to such large classes. It's more like a rock concert or a church service and the parallels are not far off in terms of individual interactivity between the teacher and student. This is the problem. To the hapless students sitting in the back row, they can learn just as well from a tape recording of the lecture - perhaps better because they can pause and rewind, listen over and over and choose the time and place to listen.

Despite my comments, there has to be a socializing process going on with the students - at least in shared adversity. They are all experiencing the same things at the same time, 5 days a week for over a year. Because three of the NLS campuses are far outside the city center, they are likely away from their family and only connected by ubiquitous (but untrustworthy) cell phone. All rigid systems create comraderie amongst the players.

Now that I have visited the campuses, I am tasked to provide advice on how to use ICT to improve and support their educational goals - now and into the future. I have so many ideas swirling around and so will start with a simple brain dump of these ideas. I expect to expound on some of these in blog posts here.