Hamid Bashir, product manager at Distinction Labs, working on his laptop at FlexiSaf’s office in Garki, Abuja, Nigeria on August 29, 2026. Photo: Ibrahim Ismail, bird story agency
Increasing time demands and the challenge of reaching learners beyond traditional classrooms is pushing educators across the continent to turn to artificial intelligence to plan courses, generate learning materials, and support students outside of class. Nigeria may be leading the way.
By Ibrahim Ismail, bird story agency
Students at Abuja’s Santuval Academy used to convene in rented classrooms for lessons in finance, accounting, and investment. Lecturers were pushed to plan materials around their teaching schedules, while the academy had to cover the cost of keeping the physical classrooms open.
Idris Abba, a chartered accountant and lecturer at the academy, was finding it difficult to keep up the arrangement, while students had varying expectations about how and where they wanted to learn.
“We were having challenges at our center 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.”
The school also spent a significant amount of time producing lecture plans and learning resources. Abba began looking for technology that could help ease some of that workload.
In 2025, he discovered Distinction AI, an education technology platform developed by Distinction Labs, a subsidiary of Nigerian education technology company FlexiSAF Edusoft Limited, which delivers end-to-end education solutions for schools and institutions.
Distinction AI is an educational technology platform that employs artificial intelligence to assist lecturers, tutors, and other educators in creating online courses and teaching materials. The platform allows users to generate and manage course content, such as lecture slides and videos, as well as assignments and exams. It also enables instructors to provide their courses to students online, including through paid courses.
Abba did some more research and found that universities were beginning to formalize how artificial intelligence could be employed in teaching. According to a UNESCO poll from 2025, about two-thirds of higher education institutions either had guidance on artificial intelligence or were developing it, as they dealt with its use in teaching, research, and academics.
Abba’s academy eventually transferred its classes online. According to him, one of the most significant changes was the time required to develop 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.”
Abba currently creates courses on the platform and tracks his students’ assignments. He claims that an AI assistant can mark coursework and offer students with scores and feedback.
For him, the transformation has been less about replacing teaching and more about figuring out how to handle some of the work surrounding it.
His experience reflects a challenge faced by many lecturers who have to balance teaching with preparing course materials, setting and marking assessments, research and student engagement.
Umar Adam Ibrahim, a computer scientist, an AI researcher and lecturer at Nigeria’s Nile University said teachers may allocate a significant amount of time to administrative and educational preparation.
“The lecturer does not really have time for research, for student engagement, for mentorship and even community services.The ability for you to create a slide using AI, the ability for you to upload your course content that you can further monetize is a plus from the side of the lecturer,” he explained.
Umar added that AI has the potential to assist more personalized learning approaches.
“From the side of the student, the ability for you to get a personalized learning structure based on your learning speed, based on your learning ability, it’s also a plus to the student on the other hand.”
The platform originated from an internal challenge at FlexiSAF, where employees were spending a significant amount of time developing courses and training materials for new hires. The team later looked into how the same method could be utilized to help educators and students outside of the company.
Hamid Bashir, a petroleum chemist and engineer who began his career in the oil and gas industry and later went into education technology, leads Distinction AI product development.
Bashir attended the American University of Nigeria before pursuing process systems engineering. He started his work in the oil and gas industry but later switched to education technology.
“I started my journey in the oil and gas sector, but as time went on, I realized 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 academic experience. In crowded courses, he struggled to receive individual attention from lecturers and frequently had to search 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 those learning.”
Bashir believes the issue was not the professors themselves, but the number of students they had to teach.
Distinction AI was established in 2024 and is now assisting lecturers, teachers, coaches, and other educators in creating and delivering course materials online.
“Before you build solutions, you identify problems, and then you build the solutions to those problems,” Bashir said.
The innovation allows users to create courses using assets like slides and videos, and course producers can sell their courses to learners.
Since its inception, Distinction AI has helped over 10,000 instructors produce 20,000 courses on the marketplace. There are currently over 160,000 learners on the site, who have spent over two million hours learning.
However, the employment of artificial intelligence in education has limitations. Bashir adds that the team noticed instances where the algorithm produced wrong responses, 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.”
The team then implemented a quality assurance process in which the generated questions were vetted before making them available 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.”
Umar believes that as more educational institutions use AI tools, such precautions become increasingly vital. He believes universities must review how student information, 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 also believes Nigerian education authorities and universities need clearer policies on the use of AI.
“For policy, of course, there is a need for NUC (National Universities Commission), Ministry of Education, and all tertiary institution related body to come up with a policy that has to do with AI and tertiary institution, and this has to do with AI usage and accountability.”
Evidence from Nigeria demonstrates that AI can be effective when it works alongside teachers rather than replacing them.
In a 2025 World Bank study in Edo State, students who received AI tutoring with instructor assistance for six weeks achieved learning gains equivalent to 1.5 to two years of traditional schooling.
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