Ekati borrows its words from the way a Cameroonian school already talks. A sequence is six real weeks of lessons and evaluation. A broadsheet is the sheet the class teacher pins up at the end of a term. A matricule is the number written at the back of a shirt. This page explains each of those words the way you would explain it to somebody who had never heard it: what the thing is, what you do with it, and what it changes.

It is organised by where you meet the word rather than by the alphabet. Four groups follow — the school itself, teaching and assessment, money and selling, and the website — and inside a group the entries follow the order you are likely to need them.

Where a word carries a special meaning in Cameroon, the definition says so rather than offering an English substitute that would be wrong. Where a word sounds ordinary but behaves unusually — a discount that is an amount off rather than a price, a receipt that is never thrown away — that is stated too.

What kind of school you are

Institution

A subscribing school, university or training centre — one tenant of the platform. Everything belongs to exactly one: its learners, its fees, its results, its logo, its website. Nothing crosses between institutions, so a mistake made in one school can neither be seen nor corrected from another.

Program mode

The kind of school, chosen once and doing most of the deciding: University, Vocational, Basic education or Secondary education. It shapes the year, the class names, the mark weighting, the default fees and the report card. Changing it later is possible; choosing it before the first class exists is far cheaper.

Sub-system

The language your school teaches and writes in: Anglophone, Francophone or Bilingual. It decides which class names you get — Form 1 or 6ème — and which report card Ekati proposes for your school.

How the year is cut up

Academic year

The twelve months a school is currently running, and the container every dated thing hangs from: fees, timetables, assignments, report slips, logbook hours and the payroll itself. Exactly one academic year is current at a time, and it is what “this year” means on every screen.

Semester

One half of a university year, about eighteen weeks. Used by universities and by vocational training centres, which run terms and semesters together. The current semester is what “now” means for grade entry and for which lessons are open.

Term

One of the three blocks a basic or secondary year is divided into, about eighteen weeks each: first, second and third term. Everything a learner does is recorded against one of them, including the six sequences inside it.

Sequence

A six-week block inside a term — five weeks of teaching and one week of evaluation. A Cameroonian basic or secondary year therefore has three terms and eighteen sequences, and in those schools the sequence, not the term, is the unit a learner is actually marked in. Entering marks at term level in a basic education school is refused for exactly this reason.

Who is taught, and where

Class

The group a learner belongs to for the year: Form 3A, Primary 6, Level 200. A class decides which courses are offered, who sits on which timetable, whose marks go on which broadsheet, and what its fee grid says. In a vocational school the same idea is called a cohort, such as Cohort 2026, usually split into Group A and Group B; in a university it is called a level.

Hall

A physical room: a named place with a capacity that lessons are scheduled into. Creating a class automatically creates its default hall for thirty, so nobody has to invent a room list before a timetable can be built.

The taught thing itself

Course

A subject or unit of study — Mathematics, Biology, Carpentry Workshop — offered to a particular class. Each course carries a coefficient, the Cameroonian weighting that makes an important subject count more on the report, and can also carry credits, an assessment template, a price and a certificate.

Module

A chapter of a course. A course on Civic Education might have modules on citizenship, on rights and on duties, each containing several lessons. A module can also be shown to learners as a lesson in its own right.

Lesson

The smallest thing a learner does. It comes in seven kinds: text, image, video, audio, document, quiz and exam. A course’s progress, its percentage complete and its certificate all count lessons, which is why the number of lessons matters more than the number of modules.

Teacher workload

The list of courses a particular teacher has been allocated for the current term, with the hours attached to each. It is what a head of school reads to check that nobody is carrying four streams while another carries none, and it is what the monthly payroll is calculated from once those hours have been verified.

How a mark becomes a grade

Assessment template

Your school’s answer to the question “how do we turn marks into a grade?”: a set of labelled columns, each with a maximum score and a percentage of the final result. The Cameroonian standard is Continuous Assessment 30 and Exam 70; universities also get Theory 60 and Practical 40; vocational schools also get Theory 40 and Practice 60. The template is what makes a total computable rather than typed.

Component

One column of an assessment template — “Exam”, “Practical”, “Continuous Assessment”. An assignment or a quiz can be attached to a component, and that is how its score reaches the final total. Every subject’s marks are a set of component marks first and a total only afterwards.

Grade

The band a computed average falls into: Distinction, Merit, Pass, Needs Improvement, or whatever ladder your own school has set. The average is worked out from the component marks using the template and expressed out of twenty, and the grade follows from it. Nobody types a grade, and nobody types an average.

Correction

The record of a teacher having marked one piece of submitted work — a piece of homework, a quiz, an exam — question by question, with remarks and, where needed, a request for another attempt. It stays a draft while the teacher is still working on it, and it becomes visible to the learner only once it is published. Once published, it is locked for that version of the work.

The documents a term ends with

Broadsheet

The class performance board: every learner down the side, every subject across, with totals, averages, rank and the class average. It is also the sign-off screen — it can only be built and published once every course in the class has submitted its marks, which is why a missing subject is named to you rather than silently averaged over.

Report card

The page a parent receives. You design it once — your school’s name, logo, colours and layout — and Ekati fills in each learner’s real data at printing time, so a whole class of identical slips takes a single button. Official bilingual layouts for Cameroonian secondary schools are supplied ready to use.

Transcript

The university record: every semester a learner has sat, with the grades, the credits and the resulting average, laid out as an official academic record. It is a different document from a report card, and it is the one a student applies with later.

University and repeat paperwork

Form B

The Cameroonian university course-registration form. A student declares which courses they will take in the coming semester. Obligatory subjects are selected for them and cannot be removed, subjects failed last semester come back automatically, two courses that clash cannot both be chosen, and outstanding fees stop the declaration being submitted.

Reseat

A request to sit a paper again. A learner submits it, usually against a fee, and follows its progress from their own account. Use it for an examination that was sat and not passed — not for a subject that has not yet been taught.

What a family owes the school

Fee structure

One price for one class for one academic year, plus the plan for collecting it. A class priced at 175 000 XAF with three instalments and their due dates is a fee structure. It is where the finance menu starts: the expected amount is copied into each learner’s file at registration, and every later screen reads from that copy.

Instalment

One slice of that yearly total — the first term, the second term, the third — with a name, an amount and a date on which it falls due. The slices must add up to the total exactly, and Ekati will not let you save a grid that does not balance: a grid that collects a different amount from the one it advertises puts every learner’s balance wrong.

Payment

One permanent line in the school’s books: who paid, how much, by which method — cash, MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money or bank transfer — against which instalment, under which reference, and which member of staff took it. A payment is never deleted. If one was entered wrongly, the correction is another visible line that explains itself.

Receipt

The PDF a family carries away, generated on the spot with your school’s name, address and logo, the learner’s details, the instalment paid and the signature lines. It can be printed again months later and comes out identical, which is why a lost copy is never a lost record.

What leaves the platform for the school

Payout

The weekly transfer of store revenue to your school’s registered mobile money number, MTN or Orange. Only money from the Ekati store counts: school fees are collected by you at your own counter and never form part of this balance. That separation is deliberate, and it is why a good month at the counter is not the same thing as a transfer arriving.

What people buy

Order

A purchase on the Ekati store: a course, a book, AI credits or a school subscription, paid with the buyer’s own mobile money. An order moves through pending, processing and then validated — and revenue counts only once it is validated, because that is when the money has actually arrived.

Access module

One sellable feature of Ekati, such as Grade Entry, Timetables, Payrolls or AI Credits. A school can only open the screens its current subscription includes, so this is the list of what a plan actually switches on.

Package

A bundle of access modules sold together as one subscription — Basic, Standard or Premium — for a month, six months or a year. A package is what keeps the administration portal open; without a valid one, a school cannot work in it at all.

Credit

The unit the AI features are paid in. One credit is a small fixed amount that is spent when a teacher builds a course, when the auto-grader marks a submission, when a photograph of a handwritten mark sheet is read, or when a learner asks the tutor a question. Credits are bought in advance by the school or by the individual, and the balance runs down as they are used.

A school points its own web address at Ekati and gets a real, searchable, mobile-friendly website: pages it lays out itself, sections it drags into place, a menu it builds from its own pages and news, a look it chooses, and an address on the internet that belongs to it. Five words cover all of it.

The pieces of the site

Page

One address on your school’s website: an About page, a Programmes page, a News page, or a page you invent. A page has a title in both languages, a place in the hierarchy, and two decisions attached to it — whether it appears in the menu, and whether search engines may index it.

Section

A block on a page: a hero with your photograph and two buttons, a grid of programmes, a gallery, a list of news, a map, a contact form. You choose the section and fill in its fields; and if one section ever fails to load, the rest of the page still appears.

Menu

The navigation bar, built from your own pages and content rather than typed in — putting a page in the menu is a setting on that page, not a line of code. A school can also link outwards to a programme, a news item, an event, or a site that lives outside Ekati.

How it looks and where it lives

Theme

The design a site is built on: its layout, its typography and its default colours. A theme is chosen from a catalogue and then given your school’s own colours, so two schools on the same theme do not end up looking alike. Retiring a theme always requires choosing a replacement, which means a live site is never taken away from a school without a way forward.

Domain

The web address the school owns and points at Ekati, which is what makes the site genuinely its own rather than a page on somebody else’s. Alongside the domain, a school sets the words it uses for itself — Pupil or Student, Programme or Course, Form 1 or 6ème — so that the site reads like the school that wrote it.