Team Lead: Research and Development at DigiCampus - Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa
Online educational producer DigiCampus has launched South Africa's first free-for-all and fully-fledged video learning portal in almost all of the country's official languages encompassing the national curriculum from Grade R to Matric. It also managed to do so amidst the necessary lockdown enforced by the South African government due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It already has available the learner content and lectures for the initial two quarters of the academic year and plans to add the remainder of the curriculum by mid-June 2020. The company was, however, not born out of recent necessity, but launched way back in 2017 when digital learning was identified as an essential disruptor to ensure equitable and wider-reaching education in a country that is facing its highest youth unemployment rate in recorded history and where a predominant portion of the school-going population has no basic knowledge of mathematics or remain illiterate. DigiCampus has been working tirelessly to put together a comprehensive online video platform to be able to bridge these gaps, to empower South Africa's Generation Z (born between 1995 - 2015) to fully embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and also address the vast skills shortages currently faced by the local economy. The main focus is to be part of the solution in addressing some of the country's biggest challenges, which is unemployment and the lack of skills. The combination of prepared lessons in an array of vernaculars for all subjects across multiple grades makes DigiCampus the most comprehensive online learning platform within the basic education sphere in South Africa. DigiCampus launched its offering with recorded lessons presented by reputable teachers in English and Afrikaans currently for all subjects from Grade R to 12 of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) curriculum. It aims to expand its offering to cover lessons in other languages at a later stage.