Through its Platform, Zenius Wants to Improve Teacher Skills in the Digital Learning Age

Post-pandemic, skills-based education will be an important learning capital for students, especially the current learning conditions are gradually being carried out systematically hybrid. Teachers who are considered as multi-role professions continue to receive demands to improve their abilities in the digital field so that they are not inferior to the digital abilities of their students.

This spirit is what lies behind its presence Zenius for Teacher (ZenRu, previously using the abbreviation ZuG) precisely on November 25, 2020. One year running, Zenius saw the real struggles of teachers in the ZenRu community who had to go a long way to get a signal to realize quality learning and still provide stability to students in the midst of face-to-face learning schedule that changes frequently.

“Zenius' own content always puts skill before knowledge; and when teachers have a creative platform and exchange ideas for teaching that emphasize thinking skills, together, Zenius and teachers can take part in the post-pandemic recovery of education," said Zenius Chief of Teachers' Initiative Amanda Witdarmono at a press conference, yesterday (25/11).

Community for teachers

Currently, ZenRu has become a community for more than 250 thousand teachers throughout Indonesia. Of these, almost 200 thousand of them use ZenRu platform. Along the way, this platform has further enhanced its features, one of which is integrated with Google Classroom through access to the Learning Management System (LMS). In this LMS, teachers can create classes, provide practice questions for students and conduct assessments.

This feature is very helpful for teachers in monitoring students' learning and doing administrative tasks, so they have more time to focus on their students' progress. Meanwhile, the ZenRu app and site contain the Zenius learning content library and share learning content.

The community element cannot be separated from the spirit of ZenRu so that teachers can share and exchange ideas on social media platforms. Amanda said that her party routinely held workshop, whether held independently or in collaboration with the Education Office in Indonesia. Through this activity, the teachers who are members can get various positive things that can help them to carry out learning activities in the classroom.

Head of the PGRI Aceh Professional Development Bureau, Juanda said, “Teachers are one of the most important elements in the education development process in Indonesia, because their role and presence can determine the success of education in the future. By opening up to changes and technological advances, teachers will be able to provide the best learning for students. We hope that collaborations with technology education platforms like Zenius will be able to accelerate the recovery of education after the pandemic."

Numerically, ZenRu has held 37 workshop which is equivalent to 1.184 hours of lessons attended by 85.110 teachers and reaches 75.595 schools throughout Indonesia. Then, having a total of 174.564 classes created by teachers, an average of 300 classes created by teachers in one day, with an average of 10 students in each class; and, has more than 140 thousand cash complete learning video materials.

Amanda continued, face-to-face learning (PTM) is applied in various ways by many schools, each of which has its own scheme. Then this condition does not prevent ZenRu from taking part in its role in education. ZenRu will continue to roll out other features gleaned from teacher feedback. One of them being prepared is subject matter in regional languages ​​and more animations.

“The next feature will meet these needs, hopefully ZenRu can be further personalized, so that it can support learning in the classroom and can accompany teachers in realizing meaningful learning. Hopefully can reach 4 million teachers so that they can teach more meaningfully from anywhere,” concluded Amanda.

ZenRu is one of the Zenius products that is specifically targeted at teachers. The main product from Zenius is the Zenius app, an application-based online learning platform that contains more than 100 thousand learning videos and hundreds of thousands of practice questions for the elementary-high school level. Over the past year 2020, Zenius has been accessed by more than 20 million users from rural and urban areas throughout Indonesia.

The company recently released ZeniusLand, a learning platform specially designed to develop the fundamental skills and critical thinking of elementary school students aged 7-12 years. The form is through educational games that can improve children's cognitive and emotional intelligence by learning Mathematics, Indonesian, and English through the gamification method.

Momentum EdTech

Various edtech players in Southeast Asia continue to take advantage of the Covid-19 situation as a momentum to accelerate product and business growth going forward. Especially in Indonesia, face-to-face teaching and learning activities (KBM) in new schools have been opened gradually.

On a separate occasion, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures Willson Cuaca reveal about how the pandemic has accelerated digital adoption and encouraged investment in Indonesia's digital sector. Healthtech and EdTech are two of the digital sectors that have played a significant role since the pandemic first took place.

This impact is also reflected in the increased services from the East Ventures portfolio, namely Ruangguru with an increase in the number of users up to 50%. In addition, Willson highlighted how the pandemic boosted the investment climate in Indonesia from $3,4 million in 2020 to $4,9 million in the third quarter of 2021.

"This increase was identified because consumer behavior changed to digital-based or online behavior. All investors became more aggressive and optimistic because digital acceleration happened before anything else," said Willson.