COVID-19: French-speaking Africa bets on Khan Academy’s teaching platform as alternative to schools closure

Since schools are closed in most African countries and remote teaching is not provided by all schools, many students have registered on online programs like the Khan Academy to continue learning from home.

Most of these students are those who are in exam classes. Science, mathematics, languages, chemistry, physics…all subjects are available.
Khan Academy is a platform held by ‘‘Biblothèque sans Frontière, BSF’’.

It allows students to register individually to revise and work on their own from a large bank of exercises, but also to take over lessons that are not well understood in class. Each student can go at his or her own pace and watch the lesson as many times as necessary to fully understand it. The platform is held by ‘‘Biblothèque sans Frontière, BSF’’.

In the Maghreb, Morocco has already passed the 210,000 users; the Algerians are tending towards 100,000 and the Tunisians follow behind at 78,000.
The sub-Saharan zone is following suit, with an increasing number of countries resorting to the platform.

Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Cameroon and Senegal already have more than 30,000 subscribers each. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Niger, the platform is offering an alternative to the state system.

Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, in Burkina Faso, in particular, schoolchildren deprived of classes by jihadist attacks have joined the platform. The same goes in war-torn English-speaking Cameroon, where many schools have been closed for months.

With the pandemic outbreak, the number of people connecting to the platform increased by 20%.

The platform blackboard can explain step-by-step a theorem, a definition, or even the advanced program of biology, physics and chemistry.