How the continent’s leading distance learning provider has helped our nations’ students fall in love with learning!
As the 18th eLearning Africa conference ended in Kigali last month, one of the resounding messages taken away was “The love for Moodle is real!” An increasing number of higher education institutions are relying on distance learning, making Learning Management Systems crucial components for online provision.
Africa’s beacon organisation in the eLearning landscape continues to be the National Open University of Nigeria, whose deployment of Moodle has gone from strength to strength since outsourcing its LMS infrastructure management to global Moodle services provider and Certified Premium Moodle partner, Catalyst IT. NOUN offers over 2000 courses to a record-breaking 150,000 active students across the African continent and world-wide.
Here, The Director of Learning Management Systems at NOUN, Dr Lukuman Bello, describes how a stable and reliable Moodle platform gives his organisation the time, capacity and confidence to deliver an excellent learning experience for its students.
A strategic move online
“In 2017 National Open University of Nigeria decided to move all of its instructional delivery online,” Dr Bello explains. “But first we had to ensure that our online Moodle provision was stable and reliable, which up to that point had been problematic. “We had been directly hosting our own Moodle LMS platform, but slow login times were restricting student access; storage capacity was causing some issues; and the number of interruptions to the service our students were experiencing was unacceptable.
We could not run the risk of interrupted service during peak usage times, which correspond to exam periods, when we have up to 30,000 students online simultaneously,” states Dr Bello.
Partnering with Moodle experts Catalyst
With offices in EMEA, North America and AusPac, Catalyst IT is a globally proven Moodle services provider and implementation partner. Deploying AWS regional cloud hosting solutions, Catalyst IT are dedicated specialists in Moodle LMS hosting, using their own architecture design and unique themes for presenting instructional content.
Explaining Catalyst IT’s approach Dr Bello says: “In 2018 Catalyst IT came in and conducted a proper analysis of NOUN’s existing system and situation. Following this, they made recommendations for better hosting sites, with aggregated security and maintenance services.
“This gave us the space and confidence to focus on what we do best – the front-end design and delivery of courses and content.”
Other excellent results of NOUN’s partnership with Catalyst IT include:
- Uninterrupted learner experience: A remarkable result for NOUN since working with Catalyst IT has been uninterrupted access to their learning platform for learners and instructors alike. A full six years and counting of 100% system availability is a brilliant achievement, helping to cast NOUN as the most stable and reliable online higher education provider in west Africa.
- Rising numbers of enrolments “With greater system stability comes greater learner confidence, and we have seen this reflected in a steady rise in student enrolments,” comments Dr Bello.
“We have found that our students prefer the convenience, cost effectiveness and flexibility of accessing content online rather than having to travel to physical study centre locations. This gives us the impetus to focus as much as possible on the quality of our instructional delivery,” he says.
- Increased focus on continuous improvement of content enhances retention and student satisfaction: Not having to worry about the platform stability has imparted greater confidence amongst the teaching staff also.
“We have certainly expanded the frontiers of content delivery, deploying a variety of resources, media and activities to enhance learner experience,” says Dr Bello.
Subscribe To Unlimited Premium Digest.
This is premium content. Subscribe or Login to read the entire article.
Subscribe
Gain access to all our Premium contents.More than 1,000+ Articles, News, & Scholarships.
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.
