The Need for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education in Nigeria's Tertiary Institutions

According to the late Nelson Mandela, education is the most powerful weapon with which you can change the world. This is very true at every level of education, beginning from the formative stage (basic education) where a solid foundation is laid; but the most evident manifestation of this Nelson Mandela quote is seen at the tertiary level. Tertiary education provides a platform which enables any individual to harness the foundational principles acquired during their formative education stages to learn and develop specialized knowledge, with the sole purpose of creating a new value chain whose applications make far-reaching progressive impacts on the society.

What and which places spark and drive innovation?

Hence, one of the fundamental aims of tertiary education is the creation of new value chains. This means that tertiary education, in its true calling, does not produce individuals who end up in different industries/sectors of the economy doing only routine jobs that require no form of human ingenuity and creativity. In its pure form, tertiary education institutions are the centers of innovation and creativity, with teaching methodology and curricula constantly adjusting to the socioeconomic dynamics of their environment and the world at large. This very attribute has characterized world-class tertiary institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, the University of California campuses, and so on because at the heart of their ever-adapting curricula and teaching models lies creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

How We Can Avoid Social Media Distraction When In A Serious Business

Online distraction while studying.
Image credit to Connections Academy.

Often times while in a lecture (particularly if the lecture is boring) or when I'm about to work on something important (and which may require I stay online to get some resources) or I'm about to read, I have found myself drifting away from these serious businesses towards the coral reefs of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to check my notifications, who re-tweeted or favorited my tweets, or who liked my pictures. Before I realize what is happening, I'm spending hours on these social reefs, drowning into the colorful distractions and forgetting what I had planned to work on.

I know a lot of people experience this too; and I have read so many pieces of advice and strategies by different people on how to stay focused and keep away from online distraction when working: strategies such as switch off your phone or its internet access; turn off your email notifications; go to the library without your phone; and so on. But the world has changed in such a way that we now have a digital duplicate of our daily life: the Internet is an inevitable part of our lives. However, we should not allow this technology ruin us in the form of preventing us from concentrating on daily activities that are key to our growth and development and that of the society in which we live. This resolve requires we look for smart ways to stay focused on our work while online.

The Kudoso router. Image credit to
Kudoso

And one of the smart ways I came across is the strategy designed by Rob Irizarry, a technology expert. Seeing how technology--too much time on TV and on the internet--has taken over his children's lives, with a potential of health problems in the future from sedentary life before screens to the internet, he decided to design a system, he called  Kudoso, (software and hardware) that limits their access to internet TV and other sites, including Facebook and Twitter, and awards them time to these sites based on points they accumulate by completing other engaging activities such as home chores, school work, lessons on educational sites like Khan Academy and physical exercise such as running. Hence, kids will not be able to access online TV sites such as Netflix; social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on; and other entertainment based sites-without having worked for the access points. And these access points have time limits on each of these sites, so that these kids don't spend forever on them. The Kudoso system works as an app that can be installed on home internet routers and also comes as a router preinstalled with the software.

Rob Irizarry, inventor of Kudoso

While this is ingenious, it is aimed at kids mainly. What about the teenagers and adults who spent most of their time outside the house-in school, at the office and alone in their own apartment-with their smartphones always around them. This age bracket is the most productive in the population, faced with so many tasks to accomplish; but could be under-performing because of distraction from social media when at work: in fact, a survey carried out by Salary.com last year showed that 69% of employees in the US spent time on non-work related websites each day in office, with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram taking the largest chunks of the total time wasted, and costing these employees' companies hundreds of millions of dollars. Little wonder some business organisations in Nigeria block access to these social media sites because of their impact on workers' productivity at work. But we need other options too--to augment the effort inside and outside the office. And one thing we must note is that whatever options that will emerge must involve our own conscious voluntary effort to help them help us stay focused and undistracted from online distractions while working.

One more option is to develop a mobile application. But hey wait; this is an idea (others might have thought about it too) I'm throwing to app developers and the likes out there (I'm yet to learn how to code; but learning how to code I have promised myself: it may not be now, but I must surely learn how to code). So let's go back to the application. What if there is a mobile application that can block access to all social media sites and apps and uses an algorithm to block access to other entertainment based sites (unless you are working on something entertainment-related). The app will have a Work Mode and a Leisure Mode. For instance, if you are about to work on a project, you open the app on your smartphone, or computer (a desktop version could be made too) and put it in the Work Mode. Once in this Mode, you can choose the minimum period you intend to work, or you can leave it on unlimited period (it will give you the option of easily switching to the Leisure Mode after a minimum period of time). If you're going for a lecture or to work, the app will use your phone's GPS navigation to pop up reminder that you're heading for the location of your work (it will have a feature that enables input of workplace, lecture venues and so on via map and GPS) and should switch to the Work Mode to avoid distraction, such that once the lecturer comes into the lecture theatre or you hit the office and start work, you can choose to switch to the Work Mode. You can also choose to synchronize the app with your phone's reminder or to-do-list of activities so that it gives you the option of staying undistracted from online nuisances while accomplishing your tasks.

Someone out there is already asking whether I can't switch back to Leisure Mode and float on the stream of social media networks and the likes midway into my work. Like I said earlier, its functionality depends, to a large extent, on our conscious effort to stay away from online nuisances during our work periods. However, the app, which I call UnDistract if I were to develop it, would be designed such that reverting to the Leisure Mode before the minimum period of time set by default, depending on the activity, is spent , will be very tedious, involving answering series of questions, covering science, technology, music, arts and so on, drawn from the internet such that the user may stop midway: and the time spent trying to revert will count as that spent on the actual work because the user has got involved in some form of mental work. The activity-based minimum time frame feature will start working after the user has accomplished so many tasks spending the minimum time which can be manually set on the app, and the application's algorithm has gathered enough data to allocate a minimum time frame for any input activity.

I will keep on saying it--such an application will only be effective if we consciously want to stay undistracted while working: I can as well uninstall it after a few days if it seems to impose restrictions to my undisciplined freedom of deviation when I'm working. But would doing so be for my own good?

Warning: if anyone out there finally develops this app, be sure to give me 5 % of the revenue when it explodes with success, else I will sue you the same way the Winklevoss brothers sued Mark Zuckerberg when Facebook became a household name.

Smart Home--Get Anything You Need with a Wave of the Hand.

Hand gesture control of your Smart Home. Image credit to
MIT Media Lab

In my last update I talked about how everything from goods to services is racking up innovative functionalities to earn the credibility of attaching the buzzword 'smart' to its name.

The concept of smart home has been around for some time now; but it has mainly focused on small-scale stuffs in the home like heaters with sensors; doors with smart security system; electronic monitoring of your house energy consumption; the use of green energy alternatives in cooking; and so on. But now the concept has been taken very farther up the ladder to involve the house itself that houses the home, being inspired by problems like scarcity of land in the urban areas, portability, mobility and environmental pollution. At the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, architects, civil engineers, city planners and other scientists are living their imagination of the future of housing.The MIT Media Lab arm of the School of Architecture and Planning has designed prototypes of what I will call super smart homes. One of the most interesting of these projects is the CityHome project.

The CityHome RoboWall Module. Image credit to
MIT Media Lab

Hand-gestured bedroom for some rest. MIT Media Lab

The CityHome project depends on a smart modular technology known as the RoboWall to provide the smart home experience. In simple terms, you rent a small room about 18 square metres and fit it with your customized RoboWall module--which is a transformable wall system that incorporates furniture, entertainment systems, kitchen setup, office equipment, library, storage, a home gym, home lighting, toilet and bathroom, and any other stuff that is found in a home--and then get whatever you want with a gesture of your hand: if you want to entertain guests you make the gesture and RoboWall transforms into the perfect sitting room for your guests; this sitting room can later be instructed by voice to reconfigure to a kitchen for cooking which can then be motioned to transform to a gym for a workout session, a bedroom for rest, an office suite or library for some serious business, and when you want to send some brown dudes down the pipe you gesture out the rest room . The RoboWall also enables two  purpose-serving sections like the kitchen opening into the living space if you want to shuttle between the two when you are busy with some chores and cooking at the same time (an analogue of multitasking which I call MULTICHORING); or the kitchen can be gestured to close off if you just needed to grab a pack of cookies and a bowl of ice cream from the fridge once and focus on an interesting TV program. This smart functionality of gesture-controlled home reconfiguration and movement makes it possible to live a 74-square metre apartment experience in an 18-square metre space with the RoboWall.

CityHome enables you to do MULTICHORING,
including sending brown dudes down the pipe.

Some serious business.

The CityHome project is still in the stage of prototype, making it a futuristic solution for the already emerging problems in mega cities around the world such as scarcity of building space; overcrowding; climate change from carbon emission due, in part, to high energy consumption in our homes whose waste is not recycled; and so on. But even when its need becomes utmost in the future, it will likely, initially, be very expensive for the average income earner hoping to get an apartment of his or hers. However, with time, I think it will come to stay like smartphones just that there may be something like HIGH-END SMART HOME AND LOW-END SMART HOME MODULES; hence, the majority gets to own a smart home modular apartment, but with some having less functionality than the others.

The MIT media Lab. Image credit to MIT media Lab

Smart Cars and Preventing Accidents.

Since the first use of the buzzword 'smart' for electronic devices such as phones and tablets (based on the enhanced function of these devices as technology waxes stronger), many other entities including services (transport, services in healthcare, insurance,shopping and so on), relying on the power of super-computing technology, are making efforts to get it attached them also. We have smart TVs, smart watches, smart shopping, smart almost everything, etc.

Radar Traffic detector. Image
credit to Radar Detector

But the word 'smart' means being able to make informed decision on solutions (choosing the best set of solutions from a myriad of solutions-this requires tremendous permutations and combinations from an already acquired database of experience, facts and statistics) when presented with complex problems; and a handful in various categories of electronic devices has been able to live up to this high expectation, with smartphones being the first on the list. Google, Samsung and other tech giants have come up with things like the Google Glass, smart watches, with Google planning to bring self-driving cars to the market in some years' time.

But even before we have self-driving cars--a smart ability in cars-there is already a handful of capabilities being built into the new generation cars to justify the use of the word 'smart car'. We have cars with TVs; internet facility and many of the things that come with having internet access--GPS ( global positioning system), to navigate one's way through an unknown territory using one's car; Bluetooth synchronicity to connect your smartphone to your car and hence enable you to answer calls or take text messages from the smartphone hands-free; electronic database of your car's full functionality; and so many others.

Cognitive Safety System in a car.
Image credit to Autoevolution

These are great stuffs; but what caught my attention recently in the 'new generation' enhancements being added, and hence would qualify, for me, cars to have the 'smart' buzzword added to them, is the so-called cognitive safety system. The cognitive safety system is a technology that uses radars, video cameras and other sensor systems built into cars to obtain real-time data on the traffic of any place, analyse road traffic accident data archive of such a place, reconstruct and simulate these accidents and analyse the various safety measures taken to avert the accidents; it then optimizes the gathered information to construct the best set of accident-averting solutions at all times and in situations of unavoidable collisions.

Driver Assist Radar technology.
Image credit to EE Times

These measures include the Autonomous Emergency Braking system which uses the synthesized data and brake pressure in the car to give it maximum braking to avoid a collision or reduce the severity of impact in unavoidable collision, with or without the driver's effort; Driver Assist system which uses the same data to guide the driver on accurate steering, braking and so on.

Some of these stuffs are still in the final stages of development; hence, the future of our driving is definitely accident-free bright as requirements for the general acceptability of the terms 'smart cars' and 'smart driving' are being met one after the other each day we wake up.

A Software Program to Bill our Calls based on the Quality of Connected Call.

Poor network reception and poor call quality. Image credit to Today's Telegraph

There is no doubt that mobile telecommunication has in numerous ways expanded the growth and development of our society and made our world a global village. In fact, the great impact is very well felt in the developing parts of the world like Africa and Nigeria where I live.

But in the developing world, here in Nigeria, while mobile telecom has expanded our economy, some elements are emerging that are insidiously denigrating the good impact of mobile telecom emergence: an occasional decline in the quality of call and mobile internet service offered by the mobile telecom companies operational in the country. Peripheral to the core of this occasional poor service delivery is the interruption in call by the "one minute remaining" voice that for some seconds (and which is money you've already paid and can't be refunded) actually prevent you from hearing the person you're conversing with-you have to ask him or her to repeat what was said during the lost seconds (money).

The people of Nigeria have been complaining, but on a very weak scale, concerning the 'peripheral problem' I talked about. But the bigger problem we have with these mobile telecom companies is the frequent abysmal quality of voice calls which I can estimate virtually every Nigerian on prepaid plan has and will keep on experiencing if nothing is done about it (this issue does not look like a litigable one in Nigeria for now). It is so annoying to call a number, get connected but for almost a minute of this call you and your caller can't hear each other-- instead you hear this sea roaring noise, all because of bad network reception. Technically speaking, it may not be the fault of these mobile telecom companies all the time and hence they may not be blamed at all times. However, the rule is that one must get the high quality value for money one paid for any service, and hence the customers subscribed to these telecom companies should not be the one suffering from this occasional decline in quality of calls by spending money and not getting the quality service. That is an economic waste both to the customer and the country as a whole: there about 120 million mobile phone subscribers in Nigeria as at June last year according to the Nigerian Communications Commission; estimating that 1% of this number experiences this problem for one second everyday, thats 1.2 million subscribers multiplied by the call rate for one second (which 0.15 naira for intra-network calls) and we have N180,000;  and for 30 days it is N5.4 million; this is the lowest threshold I set but I know it could be higher than this. This estimated threshold statistics shows that annually, Nigerian mobile phone subscribers practically throw about N64.8 million into the fire.

Normally, calls are billed at a per unit time rate in most places. This billing method is okay by me if the quality of the call is at its best and which should be because customers paid for it. But because of the occasional problems in quality that callers may experience, and which is never their fault at all times, and the fact that they must get quality for the money they paid, I'm proposing that a new factor be brought into the phone call billing equation. A new software can be developed that will use a special algorithm to calibrate levels of quality in voice call which will be integrated into the per unit time billing algorithm. Technically, the two factors-time and quality of the call (based on network reception at both users' ends)-will be mathematically represented by two waves on a graph. When network reception is good, the call-quality wave fizzles out and the caller is normally billed per unit time; if the network reception and consequently call quality is bad, two things can happen---either there is a freeze in the timing of the call (in the case where the two connected callers are not hearing each other) and no money will be charged the caller during this period until the reception returns to normal when the timing will be unfrozen; or in the case where the call quality is mildly to moderately poor, the time wave aligns with the call-quality wave and the caller is billed based on the call quality alone. The Nigerian Communications Commission can supervise the development of this program and constitutionally mandate telecom operators to adopt it into their call billing operations.

This new, innovative proposal, if taken up and developed, will further guarantee that customers get the full and high quality value for the services they pay for. Last year, the Nigerian Communications Commission fined the three major mobile telecom companies in Nigeria for abysmal service delivery, one of which is what I have just talked about. But the money fined these companies will not come back to the subscribers who did not get the value for it in the first place, and hence did not record a corresponding socioeconomic growth and development. Technology is here to enable us devise innovative ways of solving any problems that arise in our everyday lives. In Nigeria, mobile phone subscribers often do not get the full value for the services they paid for; this is a socioeconomic problem--and my proposal is one of the novel ways in which it can be solved.

Smart Education Curriculum: Bringing the Extra-educational Means through which technology trends into the Classroom.

Smart Education in South Korea. Image credit to Advance Technology Korea

I can't remember who I was discussing with some time ago but one thing I got from the conversation was this in my own paraphrase: people born in this technology age cannot do without or (get to the very highest level in harnessing their full potentials) without technology, be it in their jobs, startup companies and, which is the focus if this piece, education.

Many developed and developing countries' governments and private corporations are making efforts in bringing technology into the school setting-by providing tablet computers stuffed with books and 3-D interactive materials for the primary and secondary school students; the higher institutions are not left out of this. And this has greatly helped the students to develop their potentials in their school works and projects.

While these successes are being recorded, I still believe there are much more rooms for great improvements. Yes tablet computers with all the materials have been provided (they are helping because we use our PCs and ipads to play games, watch movies and listen to music; and hence there is a very high tendency we'll always study and work on our school projects using them). However, having incorporated the tools of technology into our education (though here in Nigeria we still have a long way to go), we're neglecting the means through which technology is permeating its way into the favorites and choices of the everyday life of young people (the main segment of the society fully immersed in the educational institution).

But before I hit my target, I give an illustration. Here in Nigeria last year the universities' lecturers embarked on a 6-month long strike demanding as the major priority improved funding of the nation's universities which are owned by the government. After so many negotiations, the lecturers' body and the federal government of Nigeria signed an agreement in which the government endorsed to pump in #220 billion ($1.3 billion) annually for the next 5 years into the universities for massive infrastructural development and other upgradings. While I hailed this achievement, I discovered another problem (wahala in the Nigerian pidgin English): the hardware (the infrastructure of our universities) of the problem is being addressed, but nobody is talking about the software (the lecturers-I mean the way these lectures deliver their lectures to students).

In most Nigerian tertiary institutions, some lecturers, I'm sorry to say, are luddites (ludite from Ned Lud one of the workers who led a protest against the industrial revolution in factories in the early 19th century when machines were taking over the works done manually by workers) and old fashioned in even the knowledge base of their specialty: imagine a lecturer detesting the use of electronic boards and projectors in teaching students; students using their phones and tablet computers to read, reminding them that in their own days they carried their big books to the libraries and read them from cover to cover. Another set of lecturers would teach students with notes they made in the 1980s and 90s and expect them to give them back in exam exactly what they taught them: if any student dared including new stuffs and updates as regards the particular course such a student might fail the course. And so this is the wahala I saw after the strike issue. 

Smart Education: personalizing teaching to student needs. Image credit to Smarttech

The world is changing and the knowledge database of each discipline is expanding at an incredibly exponential rate because of the rapid advances in science and technology. And for the disciples of each of these areas of knowledge to keep up, the tools of technology and the various means through which these tools are used (especially in the extra-school setting) are indispensable and must be incorporated into the academic learning setting.

Efforts are already being made in this direction (educational games and so on). Another strong extra-school means through which tech tools are voraciously being used is the social media-Facebook, Twitter and so on. This can be incorporated into the educational curriculum (but how many teachers and lecturers will agree to this at least in my country, Nigeria?.....That's the problem). However, some teachers, not in Nigeria unfortunately, are already experimenting this idea. According to a report on the New York Times, some high school teachers in Iowa, US are already experimenting with incorporating social media into classroom teaching and discussion in which students use Twitter to contribute to discussions on various topics in class, and some of them have recorded increased participation of their students in such discussions because social media (in this case Twitter) which appeals to them has been infused into what otherwise was a boring topic to them. The report also highlights some universities which have developed their own on-campus social media forums for academic discussions.

Though there are many critics of this approach, and it is understandable as there are tendencies of distraction, but it is still being experimented on and can be improved on. One such way is to configure such forums to monitor and indicate when a student has strayed off the subject of discussion ONLY DURING THE CLASSROOM DISCUSSION; it will possibly get better with time. And other social media like Facebook can be incorporated by schools and universities; and universities can develop their own online discussion forums linked to Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networks to be used as part of some classroom teaching and discussion.

I hope universities here in Nigeria can embrace this modality as one of its teaching methods. There are signs they will with time; one sign, though it is still at the student level, is the social education network Acada360 co-founded by Mr. Godswill Oyor, a Law graduate of my school, the University of Ibadan. Acada360, I will say is still evolving, is where students in Nigerian universities can upload their notes taken by them in class and get rewards when other students download them. I got to know about this site today on Instagram. Social media technology has come to stay and rapidly advance and our school curriculum must capitalize on its positive prospects.