Help them to realise their dreams, please!
There are many Jamaican young people with excellent business ideas, but little support to bring them to fruition, complains Christian Stokes, the conceptualiser of the Caribbean’s first ever multimedia online learning environment, Caribbeanischool.com.
“We need to find ways to finance the dreams of our young people,” Stokes urged the business community. “Many of them have brilliant ideas but they are not able to access the funds from banks so often they don’t realise their dreams,” he said at last week’s launch of the Caribbeanischool.com at the Alhambra Inn in Kingston.
The online school is Stokes’ brainchild but is based on the Jamaica Observer’s CXC lecture series texts and its Study Guide which appears in the Tuesday Observer.
It contains lessons in Mathematics, English Language, Accounts, Principles of Business and Information Technology and uses a blog, podcasts, live online classes, tutors and multi-media, text messaging and e-book learning as teaching methodologies to target fourth and fifth form students preparing for the regional CSEC exams.
“I have spent the last 15-20 years mentoring and tutoring young people and have come across many of them who have really good ideas that have economic value, in my view. But one of the problems that most of them have had is how to finance these ideas and traditional methods of financing are not really viable for them, which in most cases, is loans and if you come to the bank you need security.
“Furthermore, in a lot of the cases what the young people want is not so much debt financing but equity financing. So as a country, we need to apply ourselves to see either how we can provide really cheap debt financing to young people with really good business ideas, or see what avenues there may be to create a sort of equity fund for these ideas,” he said.
Stokes gave the example of Marlon Maulsby, a 21-year-old third year student of the HEART Trust’s Vocational Training & Development Institute (VTDI) who was one of the local web developers who helped create and refine the caribbeanischool.com website.
Maulsby created the audio-visual animation for some of the lessons, the graphics and he also worked on the demo for the website.
“I’m really proud of him. Because he is HEART trained and because he is a youngster,” said Stokes, noting that had it not been for the online school project, Maulsby would perhaps not have got the opportunity to display his talent and skill locally.
Stokes said that Caribbeanischool was not a solution in itself and a lot of other things had to come in place first, for example, the government’s e-learning programme that was busy putting up infrastructure in schools for computers and so on, would play an important role.
Alumni associations in building computer labs, and cable companies that were increasing the availability of Internet access around the country, as well as the quality of that Internet access, all played a role in creating that environment.
A 30-day subscription to Caribbeanischool costs US$30 while users will pay US$75 for 90 days. This is in addition to the US$7 registration fee.
At last week’s launch, the Observer’s chief executive officer, Edward Khoury, reiterated the newspaper’s commitment to education in Jamaica and noted the importance of the CXC lecture series, the Study Guide and the GSAT textbooks in helping students prepare for national and regional exams.
“We are pleased that our long-term commitment to the Study Guide will also have a presence in cyber space,” he said.