SINCE the onset of COVID-19 which forced the closure of schools in Jamaica, many local educational institutions have been able to face the challenges of remote learning thanks to the presence of BookFusion. BookFusion is an open e-book platform with a global reach extending well beyond the confines of the island.

Founded by Chief Executive Officer (CEO Dwayne Campbell in 2015, the company has been an invaluable catalyst in revolutionising education in the country and adapting it to the digital era. Over the past four years the Ministry of Education has distributed its entire catalogue of flat and interactive educational books through its digital library on BookFusion.

The significance of this in the current coronavirus pandemic cannot be overstated as it has helped Jamaican educational institutions meet the needs of Jamaican students, despite the adverse circumstances of closed schools necessitating remote learning on an increased, unexpected and unprecedented scale.

“Over the COVID-19 period students have accessed content – spending over 780,000 minutes reading, learning and interacting with the ministry’s content,” Campbell revealed. “This content continues to be free, open and accessible to all students islandwide and is true testament to the idea of learning without borders.”

There are particular features of the BookFusion platform that are key to helping educational ministries, institutions, publishers and other stakeholders seamlessly integrate technology into the learning process.

One of these features is offline functionality. Students are able to read, study, answer questions or interact with content without Internet connectivity. Once Internet connectivity is restored to their devices, their progress can then be seamlessly synced to all their other devices.

“With offline functionality, BookFusion reduces the need for students to have constant Internet access to be able to consume educational content,” Campbell explained. “In the present, harsh economic reality of the pandemic where many families are cutting costs, the ability to save money by doing work offline and thereby minimise expenses by limiting Internet connectivity is an asset.

“Conversely, institutions can push content – be it study guides, interactive content, or lesson plans to students and teachers – quickly and securely with the click of a button,” he added.

Another benefit of BookFusion to the local education system is that it is a huge repository of content.

BookFusion provides educational institutions with free access to over 70,000 resources while also hosting the largest Caribbean digital educational catalogue through partnerships with local, regional and international publishers like LMH Publishing, Oxford University Press, HarperCollins,UWIPress, Carlong Publishers, Macmillan Publishers and others.

This gives educators and learners digital access to the same resources they already use in the classroom today, which again allows for a seamless transition from the pre-COVID-19 reality to the present one. And this content catalogue is not static. It is constantly growing.

The platform also has the added value of a wide range of interactivity such as tracing letters, colouring, questions and answers, videos, audio and animation. In the new reality of learning from home brought on by the pandemic these tools allow students to be completely engaged and immersed in content while learning, minimising the stressful impact of the recent changes to the ways in which they learn.

According to Campbell, numerous organisations have accelerated their transition from print to digital because of the coronavirus crisis. Requests include digitisation services, the digital library solution, and the procurement of licensed content.

The CEO claims that by facilitating these requests BookFusion is positively impacting a wide range of stakeholders across the whole education ecosystem.

“BookFusion is a partner for all stakeholders,” he insisted. “We work with publishers and authors to digitise and make their content securely accessible in a user-friendly manner, and we work with educational institutions to digitise their content while also facilitating the licensing of the same textbooks they use in the classroom so that these e-textbooks can be easily distributed and conveniently accessed by learners.”

The BookFusion founder is confident that the platform will continue to be able to meet the increasing educational needs in the coronavirus crisis.

“Based on the macro trend of the transition from print to digital, we had anticipated a faster adoption before COVID-19 and so we are very prepared,” he assured. “As a global company, our platform was built from the ground up to be scalable across the entire stack. We have both local and international partners and clients, with the capability to meet their needs and scale quickly.

“When it comes to human resources, we recently expanded our development team to allow us to release new features and improvements faster. We will also be hiring for other operational roles in the upcoming months.”