(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
Quality education is essential to sustainable development. Access to safe learning spaces, reliable resources, an accredited and student-centered curriculum, and effective teachers all foster individual, societal, and economic growth, and preserve and advance cultural values that pass to future generations. In other words, a nation's educational system directly affects its potential to prosper. The UNESCO Education Monitoring Report, for example, suggests that the development of basic reading skills among students in low-income countries would help 171 million people escape extreme poverty.
Inequitable access to education opportunities remains the biggest challenge to capitalizing on this force. Barriers include poor transportation infrastructure, which means that many students in remote rural areas must walk long distances to school, and poverty, which forces many students to work rather than study as their families struggle to survive.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated barriers like these. A useful metric here is learning poverty: the share of children who haven’t achieved minimum reading proficiency in school, adjusted by the proportion of children out of school. According to a World Bank report, the rate of learning poverty increased from 57 percent to 70 percent in low- and middle-income countries in the first 2 years of the pandemic due to extended school closures, and girls and vulnerable groups already struggling to access education were even more likely to fall behind. Save the Children estimates that 9.7 million children in the poorest and most marginalized areas worldwide may permanently miss out on educational opportunities.
Meanwhile, disruptions like the earthquake that hit Syria and Turkey, and wars in the Ukraine, Pakistan, and Sudan have made “digital education” or “distance learning” a necessity rather than just an advantage. This has prompted many countries to expand the use of technology to enhance their educational systems, improve student and teacher performance, and bridge the education gap between urban and remote areas.
These investments in digital innovation have the potential to not only create new, high-quality, low-cost, and scalable learning platforms, but also strengthen digital infrastructure, build capacity, and develop industry-wide standards for equitable access. The Digital School, an initiative also known as Madrasa, launched in 2020 that focuses on education access for vulnerable groups and refugees in Arab communities and beyond, offers an example.
Building on Previous Efforts
The Digital School is part of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, a foundation comprising more than 30 different projects and entities that target issues such as humanitarian and relief aid, health care, and community empowerment. Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai, launched most of these efforts but sees the Digital School as a top priority for sustainable development.
The initiative was designed to complement the goals of prior programs, including Dubai Cares, which originally focused on providing quality education opportunities and building schools, then expanded to include areas such as education in emergencies and protracted crises, as well as gender equity in education. The Digital School also builds on the Arab Reading Challenge, which promotes reading in Arabic among youth and achieved record participation in 2023, its seventh year, with 24.8 million students. In addition, the project draws on the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE’s) experience in digital education, including projects such as the 2012 Mohammed bin Rashid Smart Learning Program, which deployed state-of-the-art technology in UAE schools, and the 2013 Smart Government Initiative, which made government services available to people around the clock.
A New E-Learning Platform
The starting point of the project was to create a robust learning platform with high-quality educational content in Arabic. Although Arabic is one of the most common languages in the world, optimistic estimates at the time put the percentage of online educational content in Arabic at 3 percent.
Building out the platform therefore required the provision of new content in Arabic and the Arabization of existing content on the Internet. One major effort that resulted from this directive was a localization agreement with Khan Academy, a nonprofit that offers a wide range of digital classes and learning materials. Starting with its nearly 5,000 science and mathematics courses, Mohammed bin Rashid introduced a “translation challenge” via social media, digital advertising, and other channels that called on institutions and individuals to contribute to the localization project, whether by translating text, providing voice-overs, or creating graphics. The project involved the creation of translation guidelines, including the use of “colloquial language,” which is similar to Modern Standard Arabic and understood across many regions.
Within a year, all these courses and many other educational materials from sources like UNICEF and UNESCO were Arabized, and in 2018, after obtaining accreditation from the Ministry of Education for content quality, they became available on the Digital School platform. The management team, comprised of teachers, educators, IT specialists, and volunteers, has since added hundreds of new learning materials every year.
Five Key Areas for Collaboration
Investing in technology can help governments and existing educational institutions make learning more accessible to more students and increase the resiliency of local educational systems overall. But success requires finding creative ways to build capacity, particularly through broad collaboration in five areas.
1. Partnering to Build a Digital Infrastructure
An e-learning platform is valuable only if students have the devices and Internet service they need to access it. A strong digital infrastructure is essential, and building one requires coordinated efforts by a range of institutions.
The Digital School has partnered with government agencies, companies, and NGOs to put the necessary tools in place. This includes the creation of digital learning centers—classrooms in existing schools where teachers are present and students can use digital devices to engage with coursework, and where teachers undertake training. We have worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross to equip 1,000 digital learning centers in countries like Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Syria, and with the UAE Red Crescent to supply 66 digital learning centers in Mauritania.
The Digital School also recently launched a campaign for electronic device donations in collaboration with Ecyclex, a company based in Dubai that specializes in recycling and refurbishing electronic devices. The campaign calls on individuals and institutions to donate electronic devices such as printers, computers, and tablets to support education worldwide. It has supported 23,392 students with 5,823 devices so far and ultimately aims to collect 10,000 devices.
Partnerships are also important for securing Internet access. A mobile network operator based in Egypt, Orange Egypt, for example, provides free SIM cards for tablets the Egyptian Ministry of Education distributes to schools, and free Internet access to students learning on tablets at the Digital School.
2. Partnering for Accreditation
Independent evaluation and accreditation motivate educational institutions to continuously improve. They also make public loans, scholarships, postsecondary education, and military programs more readily available to students.
Developing a new curriculum and obtaining accreditation generally takes one to three years. The Digital School decided to pursue two paths to shorten and simplify the process. First, it aligned its existing course components, or subject areas, with the certified curriculum in each country. From there, a volunteer team created new collections of lessons, and ultimately a comprehensive digital program that included inputs, evaluation, and monitoring.
Second, the Digital School is obtaining accreditation for its programs from international accreditation bodies as a charitable institution specializing in digital education. This includes working with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), which has established rigorous standards and an accreditation system for digital education, and potential partnerships with colleges like the University of Arizona and the University of Manchester to provide scholarships to graduates in the future.
3. Prioritizing Digital Training for Teachers
Teachers are the most influential factor in achieving a high-quality education. Their scope of knowledge and teaching style profoundly affect the extent to which students absorb and retain new information.
The primary responsibility of teachers at the Digital School is to design new course pathways that cater to the unique needs of students in each region. This may involve creating and recording new materials, or using existing ones, such as lessons that have been translated. In 2021, to help qualify and prepare new teachers, the Digital School developed a training program in collaboration with the University of Arizona that includes sessions on using learning tools and interacting with students. The program is available in four languages, consists of three levels (according to topic and teachers’ level of development or specialization), and takes about three months to complete. So far, 1,500 teachers have graduated from the program.
An open international academy for all educators, the Global Academy for Digital Teachers, evolved out of this same collaboration. The academy focuses on developing teachers’ teaching, facilitation, and management skills, and has established a certification mechanism in collaboration with the British University in Dubai, the University of Manchester, and the University of Nicosia to ensure global verification. This supports the academy’s goal to enable teachers to impart and shape knowledge globally, while supporting local values.
4. Supporting the Most Vulnerable at Scale
Access to education is particularly challenging for refugees. According to a 2021 Human Rights Watch report, there were approximately 660,000 school-aged, Syrian refugee children in Lebanon alone, and nearly 400,000 of them had received no schooling in recent years.
Given the potential for online education to serve displaced groups, the Digital School has intensified its efforts to support them through projects like the Digital School for refugees and underprivileged children in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Mauritania, and Colombia, a collaboration with the charity Human Aid and Development (HAND), which runs schools for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. For example, initially one of HAND’s schools could physically accommodate only 1,500 students, leaving 10,000 students on the waiting list. HAND worked with the Digital School to build a learning room where students could take digital lessons during part of the school day, thus splitting their time between digital and in-class lessons and opening up space for more students to attend overall. Today, the school can accommodate 3,500 students.
The Digital School also aims to support girls’ education in different ways. One example is its collaboration with the Fatima bin Mohammed bin Zayed Initiative in Afghanistan, which runs centers where girls can learn traditional handicrafts. Girls can take courses in person at these centers, which are equipped with computers and digital tools, and in some cases continue their education online from home later on. Courses cover health and hygiene, reading, numeracy, and vocational subjects for women, and apprenticeships and training programs in teaching, nursing, and midwifery are available.
5. Innovating for Sustainability
One of the major challenges facing the Digital School’s work is that electricity is often unavailable in areas where vulnerable students live. To help address this, a team of Emirati engineers developed a “school in a bag” that contains a charger, five tablets loaded with learning content, a projector, and other devices. The equipment is solar-powered and consumes 80 percent less energy in total than a standard computer, and teachers can set it up in 2 to 3 hours.
The Digital School also aims to take advantage of new technological developments, including education technology tools and artificial intelligence. For example, it organized a challenge for programmers to help teachers prepare lesson plans using ChatGPT. These innovations help create efficiencies and remove barriers that interfere with access.
Looking Ahead
From the beginning, the Digital School aimed to reach Arabic-speaking students not only in the MENA region but globally. Today, it has a presence in nine countries and has provided its services to 60,000 students globally. The school hopes to reach a million students over the next two years, in part by collaborating with the Southern African Development Community and the national offices of the World Food Program in South Africa. The initial goal is to train 1,000 digitally qualified teachers and begin to popularize the digital education model in Angola, Lesotho, Madagascar, Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa.
While the Digital School is largely focused on meeting technological needs, its work starts with and is grounded in educational needs and the mission to bridge the education gap. It will continue to build real learning opportunities for students in underprivileged areas, with the hope of advancing equity and the potential for educational prosperity regionally and globally.
Support SSIR’s coverage of cross-sector solutions to global challenges.
Help us further the reach of innovative ideas. Donate today.
Read more stories by Amr Awad & Waleed Al Ali.