Zenius Wants to Improve Teacher Skills in the Digital Learning Era

Post-pandemic, skills-based education will be an important learning capital for students, especially the current learning conditions are gradually being carried out in a hybrid way.

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.

It is this spirit that is behind the presence of Zenius for Teachers (ZenRu, previously using the abbreviation ZuG) on November 25, 2020.

One year on, 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 a face-to-face learning schedule that often changes.

“Zenius’ own content always puts skill before knowledge; and when teachers have a creative platform and exchange ideas for teaching that emphasizes thinking skills, together, Zeniusand 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 the 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 contains the Zenius learning content library and shares 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 regularly organizes workshops, both held independently and 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 that teachers are one of the most important elements in the education development process in Indonesia, because their role and existence 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.”

Zenru Can Still Play a Role in Education

In numbers, ZenRu has held 37 workshops equivalent to 1,184 lesson hours, attended by 85,110 teachers and reached 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 we 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 of 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.