Africa-Press – Lesotho. SkulChat. com is an online tutoring and discussion group platform that offers resources for high school and tertiary students in Lesotho, South Africa and Botswana.
It was founded by Thabo Sello to promote and help all high school and tertiary students with learning capabilities. Sello said he started the platform with the mandate to assist high school and
tertiary students with their academics free of charge. He stated that he created the platform during the first lockdown last year after he had realised
that most students cannot access learning materials. “This website offers free tutorials and allows for group discussions; students can as well download
question papers from the website for free. We also realised that sometimes teachers are unable to finish syllabuses at school, so we can back them up if
they happen to run out of time, some can encourage their students to join the website and register and to access tutorials,” he noted. He also added that when he first started tutoring, he created the Cada Academics website
where students were able to hire a tutor online to help them with their academics but he realised that the market here in Lesotho is very poor thus he changed
it to SkulChat where he made everything accessible for free. The SkulChat also allows free membership where students get limited content and discuss with
other students in discussion groups. Also, they offer Premium Membership where students get premium learning content and online classes with Assistants and tutors in premium discussion
groups for R150/month or R1080/year. “This website will benefit students, tutors and teachers. For students it can enable and equip their studies whereby they can get access to all the school materials
they need with just a small fee or freely. For tutors since we pay them to access their videos we are helping them promote their market by buying their
videos, some of them are not known then it is a great opportunity for them to be widely known for what they do. Teachers can benefit as well in that they can
distribute content to their students or maybe even share among themselves as teachers, and sometimes grant them knowledge about everything they need to be
acquainted with for their teaching and lesson planning,” he noted. He further said for future purposes it may help in that teachers can assess students’ progress and plan on how to assist them going forward.
“I also have a podcast for the website where we talk to other former students about the challenges they faced in school and their advice to the current students,” he concluded.
