The Federal Government has unveiled a digital services platform known as the Tertiary Education Research, Applications and Services (TERAS).
The platform, initiated by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund), was unveiled by the Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman on Tuesday in Abuja.
TERAS provides a centralised hub for tertiary education services, fostering collaboration, efficiency, and innovation by providing a wide range of capabilities and functionalities for tertiary education institutions, students, researchers, and the entire education ecosystem.
Designed for Nigerian Public Tertiary Institutions, TERAS comprises IT Infrastructure and services structured into separate but interconnected modules, offering compute, storage and networking infrastructure with high reliability and availability available to participating institutions. With TERAS, institutional libraries are empowered to squarely address the business of providing support for publication and learning needs of students.
TERAS has its origins in the challenging days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when Nigeria and her education system ground to a halt, according to the executive secretary of TETfund, Arch. Sonny Echono.
The platform also has been meticulously designed to seamlessly integrate various essential components. First is identity management through BIMS (Beneficiary Identity Management System), followed by a federated academic repository to address critical challenges faced by students, researchers, and institutions in accessing educational resources and research materials.
Other services such as, sponsored Mobile Internet Access, EagleScan for plagiarism checking, Aggregated Journal and Research Subscription inclusive of EBSCO, Blackboard Learning Management System, Digital Literacy (ICDL and Communication Skills), and Intervention Funding are available to institutions, staff, and students.
Unveiling the platform, the minister said TERAS marked a significant milestone in the present administration’s quest to transform the nation’s tertiary education sector.
“What I witnessed when I was admitted to the TERAS platform is truly impressive. The technology underpinning TERAS is a testament to the careful expertise in its design and implementation.
” The Ministry will continue to provide our beneficiary institutions and TETFund with unwavering support to fully realize the potential of TERAS, as a key component of our resolve in repositioning, strengthening and rekindling hope in our tertiary education sector.”
While saying the Federal Ministry of Education would ensure the platform’s growth to benefit millions of students and academic staff, Mamman said no stone would be left untouched to address the challenges in the Nigerian education system.
“We at the Ministry are acutely aware of the challenges that our education system faces in today’s world.
” Education is an investment in the future for our children and the destiny of our nation. Issues stemming from the past, including the disruptions caused by COVID-19, as well as ongoing funding challenges in our sector, continue to weigh heavily on our minds.
“To the dedicated staff and staff in our tertiary institutions, please be rest assured that I am fully cognizant of your concerns, and we are committed to addressing them head-on.
“I won’t dwell on these issues in great detail, but I want to convey that we are taking decisive steps to tackle them. It is for this very reason that I have seen and heard, TERAS represents remarkable progress for all of us. The countless benefits that TERAS promises to bring to educators, students, and the entire educational community are awe-inspiring and must be fully exploited, ” he said.
On his part, Executive Secretary of TETFund, Arc. Sonny Echono, said the unveiling and launching of the platform marked a significant moment in the history of Nigerian tertiary education.
He said TERAS has also been influenced by the ever-increasing importance of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), across various innovations spanning data and analytics, internet of things, convergence, blockchain, artificial intelligence, nano technology and others.
According to him, policies have been carefully crafted and implemented to harness the power of technology, unleashing its immense potential to uplift our educators, empower our students, and produce a workforce that is globally competitive and able to address national challenges as well as exploit opportunities for sustainable economic growth and development.
“Today marks a significant moment in the history of Nigerian tertiary education. We gather here to present to Nigerians and the entire education sector an extraordinary initiative-TERAS, the Tertiary Education, Research, Applications and Services Platform.
“Our mission is simple yet transformative: to revitalize and fortify the Nigerian tertiary education landscape as promised by Mr. President, by providing an all-encompassing platform that consolidates essential services under one roof.
“We envision TERAS as the centralized hub for tertiary education services, fostering quality assurance, collaboration, efficiency, and innovation.
“Before we delve deeper into the details of TERAS, allow me to take a moment to reflect on the journey that brought us here, how the deliberate policy measures we’ve undertaken found favour and support from our Honourable Minister and is in sync with the vision of Mr. President to rekindle hope in our educational system.
Echono also said from 2016 to 2018, the Fund focused its ICT Support Intervention on digital literacy and capacity development for staff at our beneficiary institutions, which by 2020, achieved the training and certification of over 20,000 persons in various digital skills relevant to today’s ICT world.
In continuation, he said the 2019/2020, ICT Support provided funding for eLearning implementation.
The objective, according to him, is to achieve hybrid /blended learning and to expand access beyond the confines of physical classrooms, saying that the initiative had the added benefit of reducing the burden on students in accessing learning materials. As of today, over 215 institutions are at various stages of completion in implementing this intervention.
The executive secretary further said in 2021, the Fund commenced the Thesis Digitization project to ensure scholarly works produced in Nigerian Public Tertiary Institutions are properly dematerialized, put online, and used to strengthen the integrity of our academic institutions with plagiarism checking, open access, public repositories, and other scholarly resources.
“In furtherance of our digitization efforts, a Digitization Project Steering and Coordinating Committee was established to develop a framework for federating research outputs and theses from our Beneficiary Institutions towards a sustainable National Knowledge Bank, coordinate the successful implementation of the dematerialization of the physical theses, identify intellectual property issues, develop and adopt a model digitization policy and collaborate with similar knowledge repositories across the globe.
“Having recognized the pressing ICT needs of our beneficiaries, we dedicated our Zonal intervention for 2022 towards improving our beneficiary Institutions’ ICT infrastructure and other needs.
An ICT Infrastructure Committee, drawn mainly from our universities and regulatory authorities, was set up to supervise the success of the projects.
“This intervention provides mobile internet access to the staff and students on and off campus, provides access to research e-Journals online all year round, and at a minimum provides renewable power solutions for our beneficiary institutions’ Libraries.
“For 2023, we released guidelines and commenced efforts to enhance online learning with the Blackboard system and increase capacity in communication skills for 2,000,000 staff and students of our beneficiary institutions.
“It was based on these interventions that TERAS came to life. We recognized the necessity to deliver digital based resources to our beneficiary institutions, and the need to identify staff and students in our tertiary education ecosystem to whom these resources are to be delivered,” he added.
Echono therefore, said the agency aimed at growing the over 2 million students and staff of beneficiary institutions currently captured on BIMS to beyond 3 million before the end of the year.
Also speaking, the Secretary, Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, Prof Yakubu Ochefu, commended TETFund for putting in place TERAS, even as he called for more funding of the scheme.
“TERAS has been designed as an educational technology mall, if you have any technology out there that can fill the gaps and add value to our nation’s edu-tech, please let us know so we can work together.
“I want to draw the attention of the minister to ensure TERAS serves as a research platform for all Nigerians. It has been built on a public educational platform and should be opened to all Nigerians…., so that it can be one of the world’s best repositories.
“I know that to do that requires additional investment, that is why the stakeholders are requesting an increase in the quantum of funding for ICT to be able to cover new advances, an increase of up to 35 per cent for educational technology for the next two years,” Ochefu said.