BYLCx: A new spin on online education

Online learning has always been a mixed bag in Bangladesh. Even though there are platforms that are doing well, there are few who can be comprehensive in what they teach due to the very nature of the product. This is where BYLCx comes in. This is BYLC's (Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center) online platform, which has recently been revamped to include 25 full-fledged courses.

BYLCx provides the opportunity to learn in-demand skills to mitigate the discrepancies between skills employers want and skills potential employees have. The website is specifically designed with the user in mind, with the courses neatly placed inside widgets concurring to the "School" that they belong to. For now, BYLC has made registration free. I took the opportunity to start out with the School of Communication, where the course was 'A Step by Step Guide to Captivating Delivery'. The ease of enrolment in the website is what I had previously found lacking in previous website-based endeavours. Two minutes into the registration page, I already had an account and had access to all their available courses. Any of my remaining scepticism vanished when I started the course. The schools are headed by capable individuals with the highest qualifications in their field. Almeer Ahsan Asif, the course staff for this particular school was eloquent and articulate. To my disappointment, however, many of the courses that I was interested in had not begun yet, but a very convenient countdown timer is available to let users know when they will be online.

Offline support will also be available to the premium users of this website. All of the users, however, will have their subsequent skills evaluated with quizzes, trivia and more. This will help the platform to give recognition to the learners who have successfully completed their comprehensive courses, the statistics of which will also be made available to potential employers.

The website promises a lot to the ones eager to learn at the ease of a click. The curators claim that it has been optimised to run on very minimal data usage, resulting in ease of access from even remote areas of the country. Personally, I feel like this is a project which promises a lot, but there is still a long way to go considering the parent company's lofty ambitions: namely convincing employers that these skills will have real-world usage in their institutions. However, there is no doubt that these courses will achieve what they have set out to do: educate.

To find out more about BYLCx and their courses, visit x.bylc.org