Last year, Clever Mukori’s Learn or Teach website was still in the planning and designing phases. Now, the website is live and ready for use.
Mukori is a 2017 Concordia graduate with degrees in chemistry and biology. He was born in Zimbabwe and was fortunate enough to be enrolled in good schools, unlike some of his friends and cousins. Although this gave him the passion for education and as he grew up and moved to different parts of the world, he realized there were education challenges everywhere.
Since 2013, he has had the idea of using eLearning technology to solve the problem of accessibility in education.
“It certainly has been an evolution. Like all business ideas, they’re not shaped in a vacuum, you come up with a concept and as you interact with people and maybe people whose problem you intend to solve. You get to understand their problem at a deeper level and your solution comes to fit in more snuggly,” Mukori said.
He first had to educate himself on the actual problem. He did so by looking at research stats and coming to the conclusion that the problem he was focusing on was not changing.
“I needed to come up with a private enterprise to deal with this problem,” Mukori said.
He realized in the creation of his website that it was not going to be a one-person job. He used the resources at Concordia, and they provided support throughout the process. The funding for the website has been a struggle since the beginning, and he had to use his personal funds to start.
Mukori wanted the website to include courses that are not only traditional, but that do things in a unique manner.
The website is an eLearning platform that has two main functions. Content creators can make courses through the website and sell it to learners. The main part of the business is that institutions, schools, or businesses can get a dedicated domain through a subscription and then are able to personalize it and conduct the learning themselves.
In other words, educators can sell courses to learners, while sharing a percentage of total sales with Learn or Teach.
Included in the website are social learning tools such as a discussion board, a projects blog, and an experiences blog. These communication tools have one-on-one and group messaging abilities as well as a share feature that can connect with external social media platforms.
“Whether you’re an influencer in college, or just someone with some kind of crowd, maybe you have a business and you have customers where you can create content and sell to, anyone can make a course really,” Mukori said.
Now that his website is fully launched, his next step is for learners to take the two courses that are up on the website so he can receive feedback and find ways to improve them.
The two courses up right now are $50 each but other course prices are up to the content creators.
Currently, there are twenty courses in the process of being made and will hopefully be out by the end of the year.
“My goal is to create a platform that provides a community where learners and educators can exchange ideas and skills. Whether it’s an individual who’s got some skill under their belt who wants to share their knowledge with others in exchange for some income or it’s a business which wants to improve the skill level of their employees, or it’s a college saying we want more practical orientated training where our students are engaging in discussions doing more practical projects ,” Mukori said.
More information and ways to sign up can be found at https://learnorteach.com/, follow the project on Instagram @learn_or_teach, or find it on Facebook by searching Learn or Teach.
