Medford’s equation for ultimate success

Growing up he has always been fascinated by numbers, and so it came as no surprise when Jovan Medford, 22, decided to embark on a journey that he has always dreamed of. The Barbados-born, who is currently residing in Canada where he does web development and digital analysis, is now splitting his time between his own online education company The Caribbean Scholar.

It was after about a year of developing the programme and carrying out several tests that he decided to launch thecaribbeanscholar.com, an online learning institution dedicated towards developing high quality online experience for students, primarily targeting those at the CSEC level, said Medford. He started out by offering a free algebra course, Make Algebra Make Sense, before introducing a subscription model for the math courses a month later. Medford told Today’s BUSINESS that his concept was designed to make learning maths at the CSEC level fun and easy.

“The videos are engaging, they are colourful and they are concise. So instead of spending an hour or two hours trying to do something, you can learn it in minutes,” he declared.

Each course comes with access to an e-book that will help students reinforce what they learned from the prerecorded videos. Students also receive practice questions and quizzes and they have the opportunity to interact with Medford by leaving a comment in the discussion section of each video, sending a message through the chat feature or via email.

While he knew from a tender age that he wanted to establish a learning institution specifically to teach maths, the 22-year-old said he had no idea it would happen to be online or this early in his life.

“Because of where I had gotten in terms of my skills with web development I realised it was something I could do a lot sooner than I thought, and that was how I was able to sort of fast-track my dream. So it just happened fairly naturally, especially realising now how important online material like this would be,” he said.

“Now I have a definite interest in making it much more than just a school for math, but for now I am just going to focus on what it is I am good at personally then I will look at bringing in other people to do the other subjects,” he added.

The former St Cyprian’s Boys and Harrison College student studied Mathematical Finance with a minor in statistics at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

He said a lot of his encouragement and support have come from his family, and he was already receiving high praises from those who have taken the courses so far.

Stating that The Caribbean Scholar targeted all nationalities, Medford said one of the benefits of having the course online and in the format it was in was to make learning mathematics more attractive to adults who did not want to attend a physical classroom.

“Our main target market would be those students taking those CAPE and CSEC examinations,” he said.

Medford has always been a “big fan” of online learning, pointing out that “when I was back in school, if I had a choice between an on campus course and an online course I would always choose the online course”.

‘“I think that a course that was developed specifically for online is extremely convenient to have quality resources all in one place that I can access at any point during the day.

However, the thing that is challenging for students now is that they have to interact with materials that were not designed to be online. Because the pandemic happened so suddenly, a lot of teachers, through no fault of their own, had to adjust way too quickly,” he said.

“So you find that students are sitting down behind videos that are an hour long and expected to learn from those videos when the material is extremely dry and not engaging at all,” he said.

Also sharing his thoughts on the mathematics results for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), the maths whiz said in general the results have been “a bit alarming” throughout the region, adding that “it is not necessarily the students’ fault”.

“I think that tender age of 13 or 14, there is something about maths that can cause a lot of anxiety and somewhere around there it becomes a lot more difficult to convince people that maths is relevant. So I think that what happens to a lot of us in the region especially is that we lose interest in it so we don’t put in the effort that is required to make it something special,” he explained.

“So one of the things I wanted to do with the Make Algebra Make Sense course was that I wanted to show people how maths is used in a simple sense so that it can feel more relevant to them. If it does not feel relevant to you then you are not going to waste time studying it.”

He continued: “I think that is reflected in the results and also reflected generally in us not pursuing maths past the CSEC level. For the most part, once we can get a pass or even if we don’t get a pass, but get past it, that is enough. So if I can make maths more relevant then that would be something special for me”. (MM)