TVET and Industry: Revamped TVET Curriculum as the Missing Link for Sustainable Economic Growth and Development in Nigeria (Published)
Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) aside from providing general education is established for training and practical skill development opportunities that attunes to national and local contexts. TVET graduates should be competent enough to apply scientific knowledge to improve and solve environmental problems. However, graduates from various TVET programmes have failed to justify this purpose. This paper explored the present curriculum using the Department of Computer Science, The Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro curriculum as a case study to identify this missing link. Descriptive and Inferential Statistical analysis carried out on some graduates of the Department explicitly working in Information Technology (IT) firms as Developers to identify whether the knowledge and skills acquired in school were sufficient for their career take off, revealed a wide gap between the present curriculum and the trends in the industry. The results obtained from the study showed that 62% passed through further skill acquisition training that created employment opportunities for them, 14% trained before admission for the TVET programme while 24% were able to learn on the job. The empirical analysis also showed that the position of the participants did not differ significantly in their mean perception of TVET programs as evidenced by the F statistic of 1.690 with an associated P-value of 0.195 > 0.05 significance level.
Keywords: Curriculum Development, Education, Industry, Skill, Technology, Vocational
Challenges to the Development of Instructional Packages for Business Education Programme in Universities in South-East Nigeria (Published)
Challenges to the development of instructional packages for business education programme in universities in South-East Nigeria, formed the basic objective for this research. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. The population was 57 Federal and State university lecturers in business education. No sampling was adopted because of the manageable size of the population. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire which was validated by three experts. The reliability of the instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha which yielded a coefficient of 0.79. Mean with standard deviation was used for data analysis and the t-test statistics was used to test the null hypotheses at .05 level of significance. The findings include: inadequate funding of our universities for curriculum development, use of obsolete instructional facilities in our universities, among others. Recommendations made include: adequate fund should be provided by the federal and state government on the development of instructional packages and proper regulation of universities instructional packages should be carried out on regular basis.
Keywords: Business Education, Challenges, Curriculum Development, Instructional packages, National Universities Commission