African Virtual School Update

It has been a long time since our last post and I thought that I will update you on what has been going on:

• African Virtual School :  We moved the focus from passing Waec, Neco and Jamb to a dedicated site and positioned the African Virtual School as a provider of skills and training for individuals and businesses in West Africa.   All our courses are created from scratch with this audience in mind.
• Pass.com.ng is our new dedicated site for Waec, Neco and Jamb Maths and English revision for Nigeria as the vast majority of our learners are from Nigeria.  Pass.com.ng should be seen as a specialist division of the African Virtual School.

The African Virtual School will  provide courses in Literacy, Numeracy, ICT and Employability for individuals and for businesses,  courses in Customer Service, Microsoft Excel, Communications, Cash Accounting, Effective Writing, Managing Your Work Workload.

600,000 Waec Students Failed English

out of a total of around 1.5 million students who wrote the English Language paper in July 2011.  This gives an English failure rate of 40%.

The results for Maths were even more depressing, with 900,000 or 60% failing.

Do not join the failures!  Sign up for a Waec Maths and English Revision course at the African Virtual School.

The African Virtual School Magazine

The African Virtual School has launced a magazine aptly named "The African Virtual School Magazine" .  This magazine features amongst other things articles written by African students both in Africa and in the diaspora on any topic of interest to them.  The aim is to use the magazine as a place to practise their writing.

Solving the book distribution problem in Africa

Printing and distributing books in Africa is hard.  Poor roads, expensive storage all add to the cost of owning a book.  Add to the fact that some textbooks need constant updating has meant that most school students in Africa have to make do with old or badly copied workbooks. 

Our workbook, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division Worksheets for African Primary Schools was up to today only available  on Amazon or through us via bulk purchase.   Today, we have added another option, digital worksheets; available anytime or anywhere through our partner site Primemaths.  School teachers in African primary schools can now generate as many worksheets as possible for their students.  These sheets are created on demand and changed all the time, freeing the teachers to focus on teaching.


These sheets are free for a limited time.  Please feel free to use and if you find any errors or bugs, please email us at support @ africanvirtualschool dot com.

African Teachers Forums

Free interactive forums for African Teachers are now available on the African Virtual School.   Sign-up for a free account here.   You will be able to join after confirmation.

African Virtual School goes Splash in Sierra Leone!

We are pleased to announce that learners in Sierra Leone can now subscribe to the African Virtual School (www.africanvirtulschool.com) using Splash Mobile Money (www.splash-cash.com), Sierra Leone's first mobile payment system, allowing you to send money to other mobile users using just your phone.

To subscribe to the African Virtual School with Splash, follow these steps:

SMS to 700:   Buy Your_Pin 078552777 40000

(A user name and password will be sent to you by SMS within 24-48 hours after purchase.  Check out www.splash-cash.com to find your nearest Splash Agent)

Revising in Low-Bandwidth Environments

We have been testing www.africanvirtualschool.com from the beautiful city of Freetown (ok, I'm biased :) ).  One key lesson learned is that video does not work in low-bandwidth environments so streaming lessons are out for the time being.   Simple html pages with as few graphics as possible is a must.  The good news is that the browsing speeds were sufficient to allow for a decent revision experience.  Two new developments in the works are:

1. We are working with a local payments provider to enable subscriptions using a mobile phone.   This opens up enormous prospects for e-commerce in Sierra Leone.
2. A local training company will soon start offering our ICT courses as instructor-led backed by distance learning through the African Virtual School.  In this way, learners will get the best of both worlds.

Stay tuned for for more...