 First published in Newsday, Sunday, September 9, 2018: https://newsday.co.tt/2018/09/09/schol-winner-gives-back/
Additional scholarship winner Darren Ramsook has created a free online learning platform, eLearn Caribbean, for CXC and CAPE students who need help with Mathematics. It is a way of expressing his gratitude for the scholarship he received in 2015. A former Naparima College student who recently completed his BSc in electrical and computer engineering at UWI, Ramsook said his intention was always to use his knowledge to give back to the country which educated him.
Last month, when Education Minister Anthony Garcia said nearly 1,500 students got zero passes in the 2018 CSEC examinations (out of 11,000 students regionally), Ramsook felt compelled to launch the free online programme he had been working on. It can be accessed here: http://www.elearncaribbean.com
Within hours of publishing the post online, Ramsook got 200 shares and 400 retweets. Since then, more and more people have been accessing his videos for CSEC Mathematics.
Ramsook hopes to incorporate interactive videos for other subjects too. However, his challenge at the moment is content, and he is appealing to people who are willing to publish content on this site to contact him at darrenramsook@outlook.com.
Ramsook said he sees this platform as versatile: it is not limited to students of any particular age, so it provides a learning platform for older individuals who may never have had the chance to write the subject due to financial or other constraints.
The eLearn Caribbean platform will work alongside current teaching in secondary schools. “The platform can make life easier for teachers and students by sharing the load, as different students can react in their own way to different teaching methods,” said Ramsook.
Ramsook said he wanted to help transform at-risk youths into contributing citizens. Some of his “friends” were led down the wrong path because of a series of bad decisions, he said. “That was when I realised that criminals are not formed overnight but are created over an evolutionary progress starting at a very young age. In an effort to make a difference, I began helping out my fellow youths in any way that I could by volunteering in peer counselling groups and even just helping out friends with schoolwork.”
During his second year at UWI, Ramsook recalled there was an element in a course called the Community Service Learning Project which challenged groups of students to find problems in their communities and develop solutions to fix them. This gave rise to his work on the first prototype of the online learning platform. After seeing the potential of the platform in Trinidad, he felt certain it could be used in the wider Caribbean.
“I started working more on the platform from the last day of my final exams in May and with advice from one of my key mentors, Dr Akash Pooransingh, I created a plan of how I should start publishing the platform. It was only on August 16 that I went public with eLearn Caribbean and it just blew up since then.”
Ramsook said his desire to help is inspired by his family, including his dad, a former police officer, who was left paralyzed by an accident from the chest down because of a reckless driver in 2009. “That time right after the accident was a very trying time for my family, but we learnt to play with the cards that we’ve been dealt. This was really hard on my mom and it forced all of us to take on responsibilities and make sacrifices we weren’t comfortable with. Seeing my dad and family fight their way through and emerging the positive people we are today, despite our challenges, makes me believe that there is a better tomorrow.”
His free online learning platform, eLearn Caribbean, for CXC and CAPE Maths students, is Ramsook’s way of creating a better tomorrow. |
