There has never been more free educational content. And it’s growing at astonishing rates daily. YouTube channels, open courses, shared notes, and videos. The challenge for families is not that they can’t find learning material and resources; in fact, there is so much of it available, that making sense of it all and ensuring learners stay aligned to what they must master to progress successfully and stay on track with their peers, is the biggest challenge for many families.
“Parents easily find multiple videos on a single topic in minutes,” says Louise Schoonwinkel, managing director at Optimi Schooling of which Impaq is a registered trademark. “But what they need is a high quality, reliable, age and level appropriate content that aligns to the curriculum – not a bigger pile of unverified and unmoderated links.”
Impaq’s online learning platform offers a unique learning ecosystem for both parents and learners: a place where content is mapped to CAPS, lessons are sequenced in teachable order, and assessments and feedback are embedded in the same environment.
“Curation beats accumulation,” Schoonwinkel says. “A platform is doing its job when it guides learners week-by-week and surfaces gaps early enough to fix.”
What a curriculum-aligned platform is designed to do:
- Scope and sequence matched to CAPS per subject, week and term
- Concept explanations paired with activities and quizzes for understanding
- Assessment banks with memos/rubrics and past papers for practice
- Progress dashboards for easy tracking of task completion
- Teacher touchpoints through live class links and recorded lessons and guidance
- Privacy and data safeguards, ensuring learners are exposed to age-appropriate content only and their privacy protected.
“The point is coherence,” says Schoonwinkel. “When the curriculum, the teaching materials, and the assessments all line up in one place, learning can be manageable, engaging and exciting.”
How Impaq’s online learning platform supports parents
Impaq’s platform, the Optimi Learning Portal (OLP) is designed to remove guesswork for parents by turning the yearly curriculum, aligned with the national CAPS curriculum, into a clear, week-by-week roadmaps. Lessons, activities, and assessments are sequenced in the right order, with a built-in planner that shows what to cover and when. This structure helps families keep pace with the syllabus without spending evenings stitching together resources from multiple sites.
The platform also gives parents visibility without requiring them to micromanage. Because teaching materials, assessments, memos, videos, past papers and additional resources live in one place, alongside links to interactive and recorded classes, parents can track learner progress and intervene early, rather than discovering gaps at exam time.
Finally, the OLP supports the realities of family life. Learners can revisit recorded explanations, submit work, and stay on track during travel or schedule changes. Free resources (like YouTube) can still be used, but the platform keeps everything aligned to CAPS and extra material enhances the lesson and understanding.
Schoonwinkel stresses that free resources still have a place when used deliberately. “Open content is fantastic for reinforcement,” she says. “A platform simply ensures that enrichment supports the syllabus rather than pulling learners off course.”
Finally, she frames the OLP as part of the education infrastructure rather than a silver bullet.
“Remember – a good platform should empower the user,” Schoonwinkel concludes. “It doesn’t replace the parent’s role in homeschooling, but it helps learners thrive and enables parents on multiple levels to teach, excel and save valuable time and effort.”
