The spotlight is on Dr. Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello, Senior Lecturer, Nile University, Nigeria.

Nile University in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, is a private university established in 2009 to provide high-quality tertiary education for the country's ever-increasing number of secondary school graduates. It has 6,000 students, 38 undergraduate programs across six areas of study, and 51 postgraduate programs across five areas.

Dr. Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello is a senior lecturer in the Departments of Software Engineering and Information Technology in the Faculty of Natural & Applied Sciences. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Kumamoto University in Japan. She also holds a master's degree in Advanced Computer Science and Information Technologies Management from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom.

Her research interests include cloud computing, autonomous database systems, parallel and distributed data processing, and deep learning. She has presented at international conferences and published widely in industry journals.

At Nile University, Muhammad-Bello draws on Oracle Academy resources for teaching database principles and cloud computing.

Oracle Academy: Can you tell us how you came to be using Oracle Academy resources in your classes?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: I joined Nile University in 2021 after nine years teaching database and Java programming at the Federal University of Technology, Minna. It was in my last year there that I encountered Oracle Academy. I took some courses and applied some of the resources in my coursework. When I moved to Nile University, I continued to use the database resources and later, I began using an Oracle Cloud account.

Currently I use the slides and notes from Database Foundations and Database Design and Programming with SQL in my Database Management courses, which I deliver to students of both the Software Engineering and the Information Technology departments. The Oracle Academy resources are really useful to help them better understand and internalize the database concepts that I try to get across.

In the first semester they get into database design and get hands-on with entity relationship modeling. We also do a little bit of SQL but mainly we use the sample schemas from Oracle Academy. These help the students to quickly understand how to write simple queries without having to create the tables themselves.

For the second semester, I teach them to administer a database server. We use Oracle APEX for this, and once again my job is simplified because they can run existing scripts for the sample databases on APEX, which creates the database tables. They also study the SQL commands in the scripts to learn how to write their own custom scripts to create database objects like tables and views.

Oracle Academy: How many students do you teach?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: In my undergraduate Database Management classes, it's a total of around 160 students. I have 100 students in 300 Level Software Engineering, split into three classes. And in Information Technology, there are about 60, split into two classes.

I also teach Distributed and Cloud Computing, introducing the fundamentals of cloud computing as an example of a distributed system. There are 45 students in that class. It's a theoretical course, but having Oracle Academy cloud accounts helps them to internalize the concepts better. I get them to spin up a virtual machine, know what an autonomous database is, and they get to understand the resource offerings in cloud environments.

Oracle Academy: Can you tell us more about your use of Oracle Cloud?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: The Oracle Academy Cloud Program resources become very helpful for many software engineering students working on their final year web application development projects. So, in years three and four I am leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) resources for teaching subjects such as Systems Programming and Bash scripting. To-date, I have used two VMs and one Oracle Autonomous Database.

What's really useful is having access to the browser-based Oracle Cloud console. Through this management console I introduce cloud concepts such as failure domain, availability domain, regions, VMs and storage. The Cloud console is packed with rich resources and real-world solutions that I can share with students for whom I have set up Oracle Cloud accounts.

In summary, OCI provides an environment that enables me to quickly explain concepts far more easily than through words alone.

Oracle Academy: Can you give us examples of final year projects?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: For sure. I have one student working on developing a web application to help in the scheduling of timetables. He intends to use Oracle Cloud to deploy that for his internal defense and I have granted an Oracle Cloud account for that purpose. This involves a certain learning curve because having developed the project on his own system, deploying it on Oracle Cloud presents a new challenge.

Another is working on an application aimed at improving the life cycle of liquified petroleum gas (LPG) trading, bringing together buyers, sellers and logistics players. The app has real commercial potential because it simplifies the way LPG trading is currently done in Nigeria.

Oracle Academy: Will these be cloud native applications?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: Not at this stage, although everything they are learning will allow them to build cloud native applications when they enter industry. But what they are doing, in the timeframe available, is to lift and shift the projects from their PCs and deploy them on Oracle Cloud virtual machines for their final exams.

Naturally, I explain why it is important to build cloud native applications. I give the example of system failure. If you develop or deploy on-premises and the server or data center goes down, then the application is totally down, unless you have a robust disaster recovery system. But in the resilient nature of cloud environments you can have replicas of the app across one or two availability domains, guaranteeing that the application continues to be functional in the event of failure in one of the domains.

I impress upon them that in order to build cloud native apps, they must first understand the fundamentals of cloud computing—and before that, the basics of database design and programming. In this sense, Oracle Academy provides an end-to-end learning path.

Oracle Academy: Wonderful. What type of jobs can graduates expect to land?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: Mainly private sector jobs. Although the Nigerian government is based here in Abuja, most students will go into private industry. Nile University has partnerships with many private organizations, which regularly exhibit at job fairs and come head hunting. Those graduates with high-level skills often get snatched up abroad, in Silicon Valley for example.

Oracle Academy: Do you have plans to expand use of Oracle Cloud within the university?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: There are talks going on in other faculties, such as Engineering, for incorporating Oracle Cloud into other disciplines. The university is currently constructing a STEM laboratory complex building. The idea with the STEM building is to train or retrain adults who left school early, give them computing skills, and provide continuous learning through short programs.

Once the strategy is in place, there certainly will be the need for internal training for many more colleagues, with guess-who to train the trainers! Myself, I am all the time learning or refreshing my knowledge by accessing the Oracle Academy Education Bytes resources available through the Oracle Academy Member Hub. For example, the whole database curricula was recently repackaged, and the Member Hub provided the ideal platform for getting up to speed. It's also where I trained myself to teach Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Academy: Good luck with that. And outside of teaching, how do you relax?

Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello: Well, my family provides that opportunity to chill. I love being at home and especially cooking. And I'm lucky that my three children, 13, 12 and 10, enjoy it too. We also play a lot of indoor games and just have fun. I don't travel so much anymore but then my four years in Japan and four in the UK gave me lots of foreign experience.

Thank you, Dr. Bilkisu Muhammad-Bello for your passion for Oracle Academy and for preparing your students to make a positive impact.