Scholar creates thriving social media tutoring programme

2794497

([email protected])

The heart light of 20-year-old Ethan Mohammed was turned on after family members began reaching out to the national scholarship recipient for assistance in tutoring their secondary school children in Math during the forced closure of schools due to COVID-19.

It was while providing this tutoring to his family members preparing them for the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE), that it dawned on him, how many other students in the country were facing distress with the closure of schools and teething online classes.

With this thought in mind, he told Guardian Media he decided to use social media to help as many students as possible—a thought that would eventually manifest into a Facebook learning hub called Scholarly TT with the tag line, “Always Learning.”

“I made a post on Facebook stating what I wanted to do and it would be completely free. I got a lot of success from that . . . a lot of people shared my post,” Mohammed said.

The Hillview College graduate engaged viewers in live Facebook videos teaching the academic discipline of Mathematics which he said reached a wide community of students logging on.

He soon moved from the “one-man show”, connecting with colleagues from his alumni and others—all scholarship recipients—and the official Facebook page Scholarly TT was formed. To date, the group has posted more than 100 videos and Scholarly TT has a reach of over 400,000, according to Mohammed.

Scholarly TT offers free CSEC and CAPE assistance and the tutors are all recent secondary school graduate scholars and merit list achievers.

“We don’t claim to be teachers nor are we a formal learning institution, we just want to help and provide assistance and we are happy to do so,” Mohammed explained.

Since its launch in May, Scholarly TT has even been able to attract several sponsors who assist the group with its fund in which all Scholarly TT’s sponsorship money is donated to the student community in the form of partial scholarships given out in book grants and coupons.

A student in need of this grant only has to simply submit an application to the group’s Facebook or Instagram pages— Scholarly TT and @Schorlarlytt.

Though Scholarly TT currently only offers to tutor students at CAPE and CSEC levels, Mohammed, a student at the University of Miami, said if given the opportunity to partner with the Ministry of Education or any other institute working for and in the interest of maintaining quality education during this “new normal,” it would be an opportunity readily welcomed.