The Brickfields Asia College (BAC) Education group said it has helped more than 70,000 Malaysian students prepare for the coming Sijil Peperiksaan Malaysia (SPM) examination which starts on 22 February. It is doing so via SPMflix, which is touted as the country’s largest and most comprehensive free SPM education portal.
Students need only sign up for a free account online to access BAC’s entire content library. The SPM education portal alone offers more than 8,700 videos that are frequently updated. Students can also use the portal to revise, learn via live-stream classes and even participate in online quizzes.
Last year BAC organised its annual SPM Seminar on the web portal, between 18 October and 20 December. It has been organising this annual seminar for eight years now, and it has been attended by 20,000 students.
During the seminar, it conducted free online classes (conducted in both English and Bahasa Melayu) that go over exam tips and techniques to answer tough questions for all 12 SPM subjects. BAC said the classes were facilitated by experienced teachers and examiners. Even though the seminar is over, students can still sign up on the website to view the recordings.
In addition, students can send their questions through WhatsApp and have them answered by experienced teachers.
BAC said it has spent the past few years digitising and creating content for students preparing for their UPSR, PT3 and SPM examinations. In addition, there are three portal portals with content geared towards O-level learners (IGCSEflix) as well as for Chinese (SJKCflix) and Tamil (SJKTflix) schools.
BAC said all its various education portals are consolidated under its website, bacflix.com
Bridging the digital divide in schools
BAC said it is committed to digitising and creating free content for all schoolchildren in Malaysia to ensure no child is left behind. “Education is a means out of poverty, and we want to help educate every child in the country,” said its managing director Raja Singham.
He added that the education group is committed to helping resolve the issue of internet accessibility among students from rural areas so that they can also benefit from its education portals.
“We want to focus on ensuring that students from the B40 and rural areas have adequate internet access to access the vast learning resources available online including SPMflix,” he said.
In an interview with The Edge Markets, Raja said before the COVID-19 pandemic, they would normally live-stream revision sessions only during the exam season.
During the SPM exams, they would normally see about 3,000 students logging in. But since the onset of the pandemic, he said SPMflix has seen a dramatic rise in the number of new sign ups for the service.
Raja said BAC wants to work with the federal and state governments to help all students, and they are prepared to fund it. He hopes the government and telcos will work together to solve the problem of the digital divide between urban and rural areas. He said:
“We must ensure all Malaysian school children can access portals like SPMflix.com so that their education is never interrupted and that all Malaysians have equitable access to education,”
This year the education group plans to intensify its live-streaming efforts and aims to provide regular sessions for students to access throughout the year.
To date, SPMflix has more than 70,000 students learning online while about 2,000 teachers have attended workshops on blended learning and the use of technology in classrooms.
