Siyavula education has secured a partnership with leading telecoms companies MTN and Vodacom, where users of its online educational platform will not accumulate data charges while using the site.
According to Mark Horner, director and CEO, education products in SA can be quite expensive because of data, devices and service costs, the company has managed to reel in a few sponsors, "We cater for feature phones so all the fancy tech sits in the cloud and one can just use the Web browser to use the platform. To offset the data costs, the platform is zero-rated on both networks and our sponsors have also come on board with our vision to reach as many kids as possible by sponsoring subscriptions. So a learner only needs to sign in and practice properly and in so doing will qualify for a month's sponsorship."
The platform's Intelligent Practice service aims to help the student develop mastery of their subjects. "The cognitive learning engine identifies the relevant needs of students and adapts its questions to the perfect difficulty for the student. The engine pushes learners at the appropriate difficulty level to get a score of at least 70% in their exercises.
"The system generates questions and automatically marks them and gives the learner a solution. But, then it uses these maps of the curriculum, and, based on what you got right or wrong, you can look at what mastery you've got of everything that you're trying to practise. It also sequences the questions differently for each student," said Horner.
The platform also collects data which is particularly useful as it can inform an educator exactly where each student is in their learning process and shows at what rate the student is learning as well. It also depicts the student's current level of mastery, as well as the time of day students are practising.
The 2016 World Economic Forum Global Information Technology Report ranked SA last (out of 140 countries) in mathematics and science education quality.
"Siyavula", an Nguni word which means "we are opening", was formerly seeded by the Shuttleworth Foundation and is part of Vodacom Mobile Education Project.
"We really want to have an impact in the SA context as well as in the broader African context. We work with a lot of rural schools through our schools sponsored programmes. We have about 285 quintile 2-4 schools through our various partnerships like the Sasol Foundation, Vodacom Foundation as well as the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation."
Horner refutes the assumption that children in rural areas give up in the face of adversity. "We see about 25% of the learners are self-motivated, they practise on their own. Those that want to learn will always find a way to do so. It is really exciting to see that there is demand for a service like this," he concludes.
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