It is no longer news that both students and lecturers in Nigerian institutions of higher learning are embracing the use of Artificial Intelligence at an alarming rate. AI tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and AI-powered research assistants have become increasingly popular among Nigerian students. These tools streamline research, generate ideas, and even complete assignments.

For many students, AI represents a lifeline in a system plagued by limited access to physical libraries, antiquated instructional materials, including outdated textbooks, and overstretched academic staff.

For lecturers at Abuja’s Santuval Academy, preparing lessons once meant juggling rented classrooms, teaching schedules and hours spent producing course materials.

Idris Abba, a chartered accountant and lecturer at the academy, was finding the arrangement increasingly difficult as students also demanded greater flexibility over how and where they learned.

“We were having challenges at our centre because we rent classrooms, and we discovered that the generation of students we are teaching don’t like sitting in one place for a very long time,” Abba said.

The academy also spent significant time preparing lecture plans and learning resources. Abba began looking for technology that could reduce the workload.

In 2025, he found Distinction AI, an education technology platform developed by Distinction Labs, a subsidiary of Nigerian edtech company FlexiSAF Edusoft Limited.

The platform uses artificial intelligence to help lecturers, tutors and other educators create online courses and teaching materials, including lecture slides, videos, assignments and examinations. Instructors can also deliver courses online and offer paid courses to learners.

After researching how universities were beginning to use artificial intelligence in education, Abba’s academy eventually moved its classes online.

One of the biggest changes, he said, was the time saved in preparing teaching materials.

“Lecture slides used to take a minimum of three days to generate, but with Distinction, in a couple of minutes you’ll be able to generate that,” he said.

Abba now creates courses on the platform and monitors students’ assignments. He said an AI assistant can also mark coursework and provide students with scores and feedback.

The technology, he said, is not about replacing teachers but reducing some of the administrative work surrounding teaching.

His experience reflects a wider challenge facing lecturers, who must balance classroom teaching with course preparation, assessment, research and student engagement.

Personalised learning

Umar Adam Ibrahim, a computer scientist, AI researcher and lecturer at Nile University, said teachers often spend considerable time on administrative and educational preparation.

“The lecturer does not really have time for research, for student engagement, for mentorship and even community services,” he said.

“The ability for you to create a slide using AI, the ability for you to upload the course content that you can further monetise is a plus from the side of the lecturer.”

Ibrahim said AI could also help students access more personalised learning.

“From the side of the student, the ability for you to get a personalised learning structure based on your learning speed, based on your learning ability, it’s also a plus to the student on the other hand,” he said.

The technology behind Distinction AI emerged from an internal challenge at FlexiSAF, where employees were spending substantial time developing courses and training materials for new staff.

The company later explored how the technology could be adapted for educators and students outside the organisation.

From oil and gas to education technology

Hamid Bashir, a petroleum chemist and engineer who moved from the oil and gas industry into education technology, leads Distinction AI’s product development.

Bashir studied at the American University of Nigeria before pursuing process systems engineering. He began his career in oil and gas but later switched to education technology.

“I started my journey in the oil and gas sector, but as time went on, I realised that to make much impact, we need to be in the educational sector to provide solutions for schools, institutions, for learners and teachers, lecturers and beyond,” he said.

His interest in education was shaped by his own experience as a student.

In crowded classes, he struggled to receive individual attention from lecturers and often had to look elsewhere for supplementary learning materials.

“When I was in school… you are too many, you are crowded, you can’t understand, or you are not able to follow. Then you start looking for resources and tutorials to augment all that learning.”

Bashir said the problem was not necessarily the quality of professors but the number of students they were expected to teach.

Distinction AI was established in 2024 and now helps lecturers, teachers, coaches and other educators create and deliver courses online.

“Before you build solutions, you identify problems, and then you build the solutions to those problems,” Bashir said.

The platform allows users to create courses using materials such as slides and videos, which can then be offered to learners.

Distinction AI has helped more than 10,000 instructors produce 20,000 courses since its launch, according to the company. More than 160,000 learners are currently registered on the platform, having spent more than two million hours learning.

But the use of AI in education comes with risks.

Bashir said the company found instances where AI-generated responses were inaccurate, particularly when producing practice questions.

“So when we’re doing the practice questions, we were having a lot of flags, so we added a way for students to flag this kind of thing,” he said.

The company subsequently introduced a quality assurance process under which generated questions are reviewed before being released to students.

“We had to have a QA team, a quality assurance team that went through each and every question after AI generated them to make sure it passes, you know, the benchmark that we wanted,” Bashir said.

Ibrahim said such safeguards would become increasingly important as more educational institutions adopt AI.

Universities, he said, must pay particular attention to how student identities, grades and assessment materials are handled.

“We need to safeguard the student identity, the student grade, the lecturer questions, so there is a need for guardrails that determine or that check to see if all these are in place,” he said.

He also called for clearer rules governing AI use in Nigerian education.

“For policy, of course, there is a need for NUC (National Universities Commission), the Ministry of Education, and all tertiary institution-related bodies to come up with a policy that has to do with AI and tertiary institutions, and this has to do with AI usage and accountability,” he said.

AI as a teaching tool, not a replacement

The Nigerian experience suggests that artificial intelligence can improve education when it works alongside teachers rather than attempting to replace them.

A 2025 World Bank study in Edo State found that students who received AI tutoring with instructor support for six weeks achieved learning gains equivalent to between 1.5 and two years of traditional schooling.

For lecturers such as Abba, the immediate benefit is simpler: technology can take some of the time-consuming work out of teaching, leaving educators with more time for the work AI cannot replace — engaging students, mentoring them and understanding how they learn.

Bird story agency (The Guardian, With African News Agency report)

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