A CLICK AWAY
eSchools take off in SA
● The fear of losing pupils to dedicated online schools seems to be forcing many private and former Model C schools to think of establishing their own fully fledged virtual institutions.
Robert Paddock, the founder and CEO of the Valenture Institute, a high-end online school that opened in January, said he had received about 25 inquiries in the past three months from schools seeking advice on how to start up online schools.
Highbury Preparatory School in Hillcrest, in KwaZulu-Natal, will open the country’s first boys-only online school for grades 4-7 pupils next year. Annual fees will be R47,500 if paid by January.
Education provider AdvTech will start its first online school for grades 0-9 pupils in January. Fees will range from R20,500 to R29,900 a year.
Curro, which owns 177 private schools and caters for almost 60,000 pupils, opened Curro Online in June for pupils in grades 4-9. The monthly fees for grades 4-6 are R3,500 and the fees for grades 7-9 are R4,000.
Mishka Maharaj, 14, of Port Shepstone on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, a grade 9 pupil at Curro Online, said she and her parents decided that it was safer to move online because of Covid-19.
“Honestly, I wasn’t very keen at first at the thought of staying at home the whole day, but after the first day my whole mindset changed. The classes and teachers are amazing and the syllabus is great.”
She is studying 12 subjects and her average mark is 95%.
“I am actually performing better here than in my previous school.”
There are 17 pupils in her class. Classes start at 7.30am and end at 2.30pm.
“I’m not missing the social interaction [at traditional schools] because we have our webcams on and are talking to each other during lessons. It’s pretty much like a normal school.”
Curro Online’s business manager, Jay Paul, said there had been a great response from parents and that the school was on target with enrolments.
“The demand has been great. Because of Covid, many parents are still concerned about sending their children back to school, especially those with immune-compromised family members living in the same household.”
Colin Northmore, principal of Evolve Online School, which will open in January, said pupils would be placed with subjects according to their abilities.
“They will be allowed to progress faster where they are gifted, and work at a more deliberate pace to master content they find more challenging.”
Bianca Woolley, marketing manager at Highbury Preparatory School, said its dedicated online school, Highbury@Home, would have a teacher-pupil ratio of one teacher for every 10 pupils.
She said there would be a fast turnaround time in marking “because we think that fast feedback is one of the advantages of online schooling”.
Paddock said that according to figures from schools, between 10% and 15% of pupils were saying they preferred online learning.
“Schools are saying we can ill afford to lose 10% to 15% of students and are trying to provide more flexible solutions,” he said.
Lebogang Montjane, executive director of
the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa, which has 793 member schools in SA, said Covid had shown that “somewhat effective teaching and learning can occur remotely”.
Servaas van der Berg, a professor of economics at the University of Stellenbosch, said that “learning in a classroom, and with full social interaction, always would outweigh online learning for most learners, especially younger ones”.
“Online learning will always be a valuable supplement to classroom-based learning.”
But professor Dick Ng’ambi, of the school of education at the University of Cape Town, said that unlike traditional schools, online
pupils could be enrolled from anywhere in the world.
“The challenge is how to instil discipline for self-directed learning when learners have to do boundary crossing from using the same device for entertainment, such as watching movies, to switching and focusing on academic work.”
Professor Felix Maringe, dean of education at Wits University, said that face-to-face teaching provided “immediacy of support from a live teacher”.
“But there is evidence that some learners engage better online, especially the shy and those who feel threatened by group learning. They feel more at home in their own space.”