FME 2013 National Conference on ICT in Education Page | 1 Peter A. Okebukola INTEGRATING ICT INTO CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AND CURRICULUM DELIVERY AT ALL LEVELS OF THE EDUCATION SYSTEM IN NIGERIA Peter A. Okebukola, OFR Presented at the 2013 National Conference on ICT in Education held at the National Universities Commission, Abuja, November 19-20, 2013 Introduction The ICT enterprise is one of the most rapidly changing of all knowledge domains. It is a major driver of the socio-economic growth of nations and one of the tools that will define the future of humanity. In the spate of a few decades, developments in ICT have recorded significant landmark contributions to the global village phenomenon. It is on these counts that increasing attention is paid to how the enterprise is developing and the role of the school system in fostering this development. In developing the ICT curriculum for secondary schools and universities in Nigeria in the 1990s, little was known of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and massive open online courses (MOOCs). The internet was used by a few. By 2003, we did not know about Facebook and Twitter and knew only little about cloud computing hence these did not feature in the curriculum. Today, the pace of development of ICT is dizzying, that in two years, newer concepts would have added to the body of knowledge, rendering a 2013 revised curriculum largely outdated even before ink would have dried on the document. Curriculum theorists as summarised by Schiro (2007), have offered the escape route for such fast- paced knowledge domain. The route is to ensure that the curriculum content is made up of fundamental ideas in the discipline as the skeleton or secondary theme while skills of discovery and learning how to learn is made primary. The central goal of this paper, therefore, is to advocate the development of ICT curriculum for Nigerian schools with content which reflect emerging and anticipated future developments in the ICT enterprise. Staring us even now in the ICT horizon, are future directions which if not factored into the curriculum development exercise, will render ineffectual, the efforts of NERDC, NBTE, NCCE and NUC in developing curricula for various levels of the Nigerian education system. Since the Federal Ministry of Education introduced computer studies into the junior secondary curriculum in the early 1990s, there has been a flurry of activities leading to further development of the curriculum. Over the years, the curriculum has been scaled to lower and higher levels of the education system. Other steps taken is the provision of computer equipment and preparation of teachers to deliver the curriculum through pre-service and in-service programmes. Reflecting on the 20-year history of computer studies in Nigerian schools, progress made is far from impressive and early aspirations of having functioning computer laboratories in most schools as well as availability of trained and resourceful computer studies teachers were not met. In spite of the unfulfilled dreams, hopes are high for a better future hence the need to focus on updating the curriculum at all levels of the education system in order to bring Nigerian learners up-to-date in an ICT-dominated world. This is the primary purpose of this paper. The paper has two other purposes. It will review the raison d'être for the tardiness in delivering quality Information and Communications Technology (ICT) education and offer suggestions for remedying deficiencies.