Following major disruptions to this year’s educational calendar due to a national lockdown imposed in January to curb the spread of COVID-19, Ruzivo Digital Learning is helping students to prepare for their year-end examinations.
The online platform, owned by Cassava Smartech Zimbabwe, is interactive and aims to ensure that students are more motivated, engaged and independent in their learning, leading to enhanced academic performance.
“Ruzivo enables a blended learning model which allows a combination of classroom teaching and online educational technology, designed to meet the specific needs of each student,” said Cassava, adding that the model was also transferable and applicable to the public school system, where the majority of students learn, including a significant number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Zimbabwe’s first school term ended last week, closing what was an unusual and tough term because of the coronavirus pandemic, as teachers and learners battled to make up for lost time.
Traditionally, the first term of the year kicks off during the second week of January, but this year’s opening dates were shifted to March after a second wave of COVID-19 hit the country in January.
This resulted in government introducing extensive learning and remedial teaching for learners to catch up and prepare for public examinations.
With the school holiday lasting only three weeks (instead of the usual four to five weeks), Cassava says it is crucial for parents and guardians to sign up their children on Ruzivo at https://www.ruzivodigitallearning.co.zw/ to bring them up to speed with the new school curricula.
This was particularly true for public school students, some of whose classes were limited to only two or three days of in-person classes per week, for reasons of maintaining physical distancing.
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But with Ruzivo, which currently boasts over 1,6 million registered students and covers nearly all subjects, students can effectively utilise their holiday to study using set topical explanations, exercises and tests for all grades and forms in preparation for their final exams.
There are over 26 000 registered teachers on Ruzivo, who help students with their studies and schoolwork.
Cassava said all subjects on the platform were developed by its internal content development team based on the Zimbabwe schools curriculum.
“We work collaboratively with the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education through the Curriculum Development and Technical Services for the evaluation and endorsement of our content.
“The beauty about Ruzivo is that it has individual student log-in capability, which allows each student to learn at their own pace. The digital platform also assesses students’ understanding as they learn, and it generates detailed performance reports to give valuable insight on students’ progress,” said Cassava.
Ruzivo Digital Learning reports are automatically generated for parents and guardians to track their children’s performance.
“At the centre of Ruzivo is a desire to impact, transform and enhance the education and academic results of millions of learners. Affordability of high quality education is a key consideration. We understand that private schooling by its very nature could not be free or accessible to all pupils in Zimbabwe.
“Through innovative technological solutions such as Ruzivo, quality education can be made more accessible to a larger group of students who ideally have no access and this is in line with the Sustainable Development Goal Number 4, which speaks about inclusive and equitable quality education,” the company said.
The digital technology group said it developed a sustainable, low cost, high quality education model that is scalable across the nation to ensure that it reaches students at the most disadvantaged schools.
