A Nigerian teacher, Peter Ogudoro, has won an award by Facebook for developing a “most helpful and engaged educators’ platform called Nigerian Teachers.”

This is contained in a media release made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) by the platform, Nigerian Teachers.

In a statement released by the platform, the award by Facebook makes Mr Ogudoro a member of the multinational corporation’s elite group of 131 outstanding community managers in the world.

The platform focuses on online teacher training and attitude modification, has over 240,000 teachers from around the world and provides free continuous professional development opportunities to them.

“The platform is a peer-support community for teachers who use the platform to follow trends in teaching, classroom management and school leadership.

“Parents also use the platform to learn effective parenting styles that enable them to collaborate with teachers for the global competitiveness of young people,” it said.

The statement said that the award was given under Facebook’s Community Accelerator programme, under which the awardees receive resource support to scale up their operations and promote engagement within their communities for a better world.

The Community Accelerator Programme was designed to guarantee about one year of sustained support for the award winners’ communities by Facebook.

Mr Ogudoro created the group in 2016 as a positive response to the frustration he experienced while trying to get education policymakers in Nigeria to adopt and promote learner-centred approaches to teaching and effective career management systems.

It noted that Mr Ogudoro’s methods could save the country billions of dollars and make Nigeria a net exporter of educational services.

Mr Ogudoro expressed gratitude to Facebook for the award and revealed that he was scaling up the platform to help governments around the world to train and retrain teachers for globally competitive education.

“Through globally competitive education, we can deliver the pace of development that will banish poverty, and guarantee a more inclusive, prosperous, and harmonious world.

“I am excited about the fact that a powerful tool for the promotion of functional education in the world has come from Nigeria, a country that has been facing enormous development challenges for decades.

“The award will provide me the platform for a one-month learning tour of the Scandinavian countries including Finland with a focus on their education system,” Mr Oguduro said.

Mr Ogudoro is an alumnus of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom where he earned a PhD in Education with emphasis on Career Management, Attitude Modification, and Diffusion of Innovations in Education.

He has also benefitted from elite education development experiences at over 10 research-intensive institutions across the world.