“If children do not learn the way we teach, we must teach the way they learn” – Margaret Mead
E-learning took a soar following the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this led to innovations coming on board the edtech ecosystem, especially on the African continent.
Edtech company, HESED is simplifying subject topics for students’ easy understanding through leveraging digital revision and practice capabilities with proven expert learning techniques.
The edtech company is carrying all children along, believing that, once students have the right support, they can succeed.
On its learning management system, HESED provides good visual, and digital capabilities. Through its Edford pilot program, HESED taught how to code and build websites, affording them the opportunity to have interactions with students and teachers.
The program afforded the edtech company a greater level of interaction with over 1000 students as HESED learnt different ways students consume learning.
Some students are visual, preferring to see videos, some like practical, wanting to utilize apps, some students who only need to listen, all they need is an audio recording, while some prefer reading.
HESED has thus created a hub, where teachers can dispense content for each child’s needs, with very little extra work for them.
In addition, the company has enabled its platform to be inclusive for children with disabilities, leading us to speak with Matthew Odu, Founder and CEO of HESED.
Why HESED?
The thinking behind the HESED project is its provision of an opportunity for our schools, and students, to overcome the structural educational barriers in our system.
We believe, that e-learning across the board has the capacity to reach more students with quality education, which is raising aspiration across board, not just for those who can afford quality education only because the introduction of e-learning is to bring education forward to people.
What makes HESED unique?
The special attributes that we are bringing into the mix, number one, our courses, which are in line with the National syllabus guidelines, and we are bringing, the cost design that is underpinned by the popular rapid learning technique to make, education more fun by consuming it in churn, such that it is easily understandable by our students.
We are also looking at inclusive education, our system is designed in a way that, you don’t want to leave any child behind for the learning challenge or the other, as no child is to be left out of the education system.
Our platform is designed to be inclusive to help them learn like any other student. With that in mind, we are bringing on board, a development that meets the need at the moment in addition to the fact that we are taking steps to look at the school system, at the teachers, to mitigate the problem they face on a daily in teaching our students.
Our platform is structured in a way that teachers can leverage technology in terms of reducing the time that they spent on developing their content. We have a content enabler they can leverage and a medium they can use in reaching students.
What have been your milestones since inception?
In terms of numbers, we’ve been able to reach, quite a number of schools. In general, we’ve been speaking to even authorities like state government, and school boards, across the country, we have some interest in the pipeline, with some schools coming on board at the beginning of the next academic year.
The reception has been good, we’ve run a pilot and that has given us an indication of the system’s usability. We have testimony as to the user-friendliness and unobstructed mode of our platform.
We have received comments on how visually appealing our system is, and we are happy with the feedback coming in. Thus, we are fully packed to take it to the next level when we do fully launch this September.
What has been the state of e-learning in Nigeria/Africa
I will start by this, the face-to-face learning mode of education is dead worldwide, we are still using it, however, that is not the future.
Many nations across the world have successfully integrated, digital education into the traditional educational system, but in Africa, in Nigeria, specifically, the room for adoption is still very hard.
We have the opportunity to bring digital education into our system, as we have not reaped the benefit of digital learning in Nigeria. The opportunities are very high and that is what we want to encourage because the future is digital education.
So, our children should be, should be prepared for that inevitability.
How is HESED including the physically challenged?
As a digital education company, we believe that no child should be left behind in terms of access to not just digital, but quality education, that is why we have gone to that length to develop a system that gives every child the opportunity to learn wherever they are, in terms of their cognitive capacity.
We are an inclusive company, that wants, to take every child along with us. These kids that we will regard as having some level of learning disability, we don’t know what we are losing by leaving them behind.
We want to change that narrative and this is in line with what the federal government and some state governments are doing in terms of the legislative framework in place already through encouraging inclusive education, but we believe that technology can enable this quite easily.
That is why we include this in our development design, we want to encourage, advocate, run workshops, and speak to experts in the field, we want every child to be catered for, in terms of education.
Bottom line
As previously mentioned, we are an educational technology company, we not only have the students in focus, we have the teachers and school as well, we want to affect the whole school ecosystem in Nigeria.
We are coming up with products that address this. In the system, we have an e-learning platform with content that is geared toward students, enabling them to study with ease, and giving the teachers the opportunity to develop content that are relevant to their students.
And for the schools. We have a school management system, that is robust enough, in terms of, managing the school system from cradle to grave, to make sure that, time is saved, in the operational processes of the school.
We also have the result checker, and this again is just to ensure the ease with which output or outcome is communicated to the student and to their parent.
So, we are coming up with all these, because our concept, thinking, and drive are to make sure that we begin, to change, for better the way our school system works.
Featured Image: Matthew Odu, Founder and CEO of HESED
Don’t miss important articles during the week. Subscribe to techbuild.africa weekly digest for updates