Pupils from Richard Secondary School School.
A Wynberg-based fund, which supports more than 2 000 pupils in rural and township schools, is providing free cellphone access to an online maths-tutoring programme
The initiative by the African Scholar Fund is being trialled at the Richard Varha Senior Secondary School in the Eastern Cape.
The programme, Reflective Learning, helps pupils spot learning gaps and is run as part of the maths curriculum in several schools across the country, using either the school’s computer lab or tablets provided by donors.
However the African Scholar Fund initiative would allow pupils to access the programme with a cellphone for free, according to African Scholar Fund volunteer Phillip Parsons.
“We are making this available to a small group of our bursary recipients for free using their cellphones. If this is successful, we are going to extend its availability to more of our bursary recipients later in the year. I believe this is an innovative use of technology that could bridge the divide between well-resourced schools and those that lack the staff and other resources to provide a quality education for learners in mathematics,” he said.
Because pupils could use their cellphones to access the programme, it catered for the many rural and township schools that did not have computer labs, access to tablets and sufficiently qualified maths teachers, he said.
African Scholar Fund would be funding the pilot programme, to the tune of R45 000 a year, to ensure there were no data costs for the pupils, he said.
The African Scholars Fund, which opened 50 years ago after seeing the need for quality education during the apartheid years, has, to date, disbursed more than R53 million to thousands of needy pupils.