KINGSTON, Jamaica — One on One Educational Services, an eLearning solutions company, on Wednesday, October 13 launched its new online learning hub — OneX — and is offering primary and secondary school students a free skills gap test to assess the critical areas needed for improvement in their educational journey.

CEO Ricardo Allen shared that the statistics on learning loss, not only in Jamaica and the Caribbean, but in Latin America and across the world “is frightening”, noting that some 7.6 million school-aged children in the Caribbean and Latin America have been severely affected due to the sudden shift from face-to-face learning in schools to virtual classrooms and learning online.  

“In Jamaica, some 600,000 students have been affected and the recent results from the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) is one major indicator of how significant of a concern the learning loss is,” Allen said, pointing out that the pass rate for Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) Mathematics is the lowest it has been in recent years, at 41 per cent.

The CSEC and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) results were published on Thursday, October 14.

According to Allen, his company is playing its part as best as it can to mitigate the significant learning loss caused by the pandemic.

“We are a solution-driven company, and we want to be on the right side of history by making our contribution by helping to remedy some of the learning loss gaps,” Allen said.

Through the use of its online tools and systems via OneX, Allen shared that students will be able to assess their learning gaps in up to 16 subjects, after which, the system will curate a personalised learning experience through a mix of on-demand video courses, live online classes, one-on-one tutoring, and academic coaching. 

One on One Educational Services also recently acquired 100 per cent of the online assets of another eLearning company — Spark Education, bolstering not only its human resource capacity with the addition of Academic Coach, Brittany Singh Williams to its team, but also strengthening its suite of personalised eLearning solutions for students.

“For the past several years, One on One was primarily focused on business-to-business solutions, licensing our learning management system, e-courses, eLearning products and solutions to government bodies, educational institutions, and other associations; however, now more than ever, we believe is the right time to make learning personal again for our students, and to play our part in helping our students to get back on the right path with their educational journey,” Allen said.

He added that, “The team at One on One is passionate about nation building, and we believe in what we do and the positive impact it can have in moving the needle forward in the education sector; the OneX platform is the result of months of hard work and collaboration and we truly hope that it will positively impact the lives of students.”