Koa Academy, South Africa’s leading high-engagement online school has announced that it is opening Koa Akademie in January 2025. The new Afrikaans home language virtual campus is a first for South Africa, offering Afrikaans-speaking families a unique choice when it comes to their children’s education. Today, only 5% of government schools in South Africa use Afrikaans as the single medium of instruction. Being educated in your home language has significant advantages for learners that include improved academic performance and cognitive development, as well as a stronger sense of cultural identity.

Started in 2021, Koa Academy has succeeded in achieving continuous, steady growth and now has 500 learners enrolled in the school. Koa Academy’s Principal and Co-founder, Mark Anderson says, “With its greater flexibility and adaptability, online schooling has an extraordinary potential to deliver high quality individualised learning. With the opening of Koa Akademie, we are leveraging this advantage of online education over traditional schooling. It’s not just that learners do better when they are educated in their home language, teachers also relish teaching in theirs. This makes for a vibrant and stimulating environment for teaching and learning. The South African educational system has long grappled with the complexities involved in offering quality education to families across a diverse range of home languages. We know that children learn better when they are taught in their home language, and by launching Koa Akademie, we are giving Afrikaans-speaking families a fresh, relevant choice in the country’s modern educational space where individualised learning is becoming more and more of a priority.”

Koa Akademie will be rooted in the same principles and structure that has made Koa Academy an award-winning online school. Learners will be part of an 8-person Pod with their dedicated Pod teacher ensuring regular engagement with their peers and teachers in their home language. Koa is accredited by the IEB (Independent Examinations Board), and the new Afrikaans campus will be launched offering Grades 6 to 8, with more Grades added as the school develops.

Koa Akademie, Head of Academics, Esmarel Potgieter says, “Koa Akademie aims to offer a quality online education to home language Afrikaans speakers. We believe that learning in an environment tailored to your home language sets you up for best academic success. This expands the choices of Afrikaans-speaking families, and of those who have long wished to send their children to a school where Afrikaans is the language of instruction but don’t have that option in their geographical neighbourhoods.

One of Koa’s strengths lies in both our creation and curation of high-quality online learning platforms and materials. Learners engage with the curriculum in a variety of ways, and this enables us to offer individualised learning pathways and implement a mastery-based approach to learning. In the case of an Afrikaans home language education, there is a gap when it comes to available online resources, which is why Koa Akademie’s team is also

dedicated to the development of new digital materials that will greatly enrich the experience of learning online in the Afrikaans language.”

For Koa Academy the opening of its Afrikaans virtual campus is the natural next step in its drive to provide schooling that is individualised and flexible for specific contexts and specific families. Anderson says, “It’s our purpose to get quality education into the hands of people, but not just at mass scale, our focus is on individualisation, so that families are empowered to make school choices based on what is relevant to them, and what is customised for them. In the bigger picture of Koa’s growth and development, we see other virtual campuses like Koa Akademie emerging, enabling more and more families to find quality education that is uniquely tailored to their contexts and their needs. Education is a highly personalised journey, and the online education environment has an incredible and incomparable scope to support an abundance of robust individualised educational experiences.”