EdAlive – Team Australia

When the Prime Minister declared on Monday night 30^th March 2020 that in the face of the Coronavirus Pandemic that this was a “Team Australia moment” I applauded. He had just announced over $130 billion dollars in subsidies to keep Australians in jobs.

He is right. In difficult times Australians pull together to help each other. It’s mateship. It’s common-wealth. It’s grace in time of adversity. It’s being there for each other. It’s our research scientists giving of their creative best to help find a cure and Meals on Wheels taking sustenance to our older Australians shut up at home.

At EdAlive we too would like to make a contribution and help alleviate the situation as much as we can. We have spent years developing state-of-the-art online learning systems that are in growing use in Australian schools. Typical of Aussie ingenuity, they are full of innovative technology and design to reduce the load on busy teachers and parents and ensure that students are always working on material that is just right for them. I could go on, but this is not the time or the place. Suffice to say that our EdAlive Central online learning websites are exactly what is needed in such a time as this.

To this end we are making immediate access available to all schools and families with risk-free, no-financial-commitment trials. We have managed to facilitate home working for our staff to ensure that we can continue to support schools and home learning at this critical time. We are available to help teachers struggling to deliver home learning and parents taking on the responsibility of home education with phone and email support. We are here to help!

In the Sydney Morning Herald article “Working parents at ‘breaking point’ supervising home lessons” of 31^st March 2020 the former chair of the NSW Education Standards Authority, Tom Alegounarias, is quoted as saying that at this time of the forced home education that, “I would say [for younger children, parents should] focus on the learning mechanics that are essential for subsequent learning, and for older kids, building and practising the capacities that will make them more confident learners”.

The EdAlive Central range of online learning websites do an incredible job of focusing on the learning mechanics of reading, maths and word skills for students aged 5 – 15. They draw kids into learning through fun yet are fully correlated against Australian Curriculum.

A recent analysis of data from one of our Adaptive Learning systems found that students using Maths Invaders Online once a week for approximately 30 minutes were making approximately 12 months’ progress in maths ability in just one term. This progress was being achieved with little or no teacher input. This powerful learning effect is just what is needed in the current crisis. Aussie parents need to be confident that when their kids are on the computer that they are engaged and learning!

As you can appreciate our business is also being impacted by the current crisis. We cannot supply on a long-term free-access basis, that which has taken years to create and incurs large costs to maintain and deliver on a daily basis; so we do actually eventually need to be paid for access. This access cost to our websites is already one of the lowest available for online learning systems. So after this period of free access, if schools face circumstances where they lack certainty of income, they should talk with us, and to whatever extent possible, we will be very supportive. We also have a system of special discounts in place to support parents wishing to use our websites with their students at this time.

We are all best served when you use our incredible systems to educate kids in this crisis and we support the wonderful job you are doing. The EdAlive team is here to help you and the kids of our nation to the best of our capacity at this critical time. We are proud to be part of Team Australia.

Kind regards

Graham East

Managing Director

EdAlive.