Unprecedented Times call for Unprecedented Responses at Eureka Africa

As our trading businesses start to feel the brunt of Covid-19, look no further than our education group to see the major impact! Our students in Ghana in BlueCrest, NIIT and Academic City have all been advised to stay home and all universities in the country have been brought to a halt. This has created a unique and challenging set of circumstances for the Eureka Africa group, and has pivoted us to look for dynamic online and digital solutions to compensate for the closure of these campuses.

Our digital transformation teams have been working overtime to bring all our education totally virtual and the results have been encouraging. BlueCrest having transitioned to Moodle almost 1 year ago is already half functional in online mode, and Academic City with its CAMU LMS has made a seamless jump to online education within 10 days.

Faculty at both campuses are welcome to deliver their lectures using campus WiFi and are leveraging the Zoom platform, which is growing in popularity globally as the medium of web conferencing. We are now trying to arrange data bundles with various telecom providers so our students can have a subsidized means of consuming data. In these troubling times, it is a welcome sign that students are able to access data for free on learning platforms, but whether the telecoms actually deliver on this promise is yet to be seen.

The digital team is now shifting focus to bringing Sierra Leone and Liberia online, before those economies also go into lockdown, which is widely predicted. We are all in this together and this is the time for us to embrace digital education and leverage the power of online teaching. Unlike other universities we were anyways two steps ahead of the game. The biggest challenge for us now is to do what we were planning to do in one year, in 10 days.

All digital teams are working around the clock to deliver a seamless web experience for faculty and staff, and are leveraging online platforms including Fedena, Moodle, CAMU, Zoom, WizIQ, Knack, Slack and Zapier for combined workforce productivity.