Educational Leaders’ Assessment of Educational Policies and Practices in the COVID-19 Era in Kwara State-based Universities, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper focuses on educational leaders’ assessment of educational policies and practices in the COVID-19 era in universities in Kwara State, Nigeria. The study set out to achieve two specific objectives: to ascertain the level of preparedness of educational leaders for  distance learning during COVID-19 and to find out the provisions for monitoring and evaluating students’ learning during COVID-19. The  study adopted a qualitative research approach and a phenomenological research design. Purposive sampling was used to select seven  educational leaders from the population of ten. Interviews were used to collect data, and thematic analysis was used to analyse the data  collected using ATLAS.ti version 6.0. Results showed that educational leaders could prepare for distance learning during the COVID-19 era  by training the trainers and creating virtual learning platforms. Furthermore, the findings showed that educational leaders made  efforts to monitor student learning during the pandemic. The study concluded that more research is needed to place the situation of  distance learning in each university in Nigeria in the right context. This is to bring about a policy implementation model that will facilitate  effective teaching and learning by distance mode in the universities. Based on the results, it was recommended that adequate preparations should be made for distance learning during and beyond the COVID-19 era. Regular and diversified means of objectively  assessing distance learning policies should be put in place to justify the human and material investments deployed in the process and  reinforce the positions of the universities as pacesetters in educational innovations.