Helping Kids and Teachers Connect From Anywhere
Qatar has doubled down on remote learning
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, online education was usually reserved for professional development or distance learning for adults. But when the pandemic hit, education departments everywhere had to create distance learning systems within a matter of days or weeks, with many relying heavily on video conferencing accessed from home.
Qatar – a country heavily invested in digital transformation – was ahead of the curve. In the Learning Management System (LMS), the nation already had a world-leading e-learning platform. What it didn’t have was the capacity to cover every school in the country at once.
Fortunately, Microsoft, a close partner in the Smart Qatar initiative, was ready to deploy its substantial cloud resources with immediate effect.
Creating virtual classrooms
The Qatari Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MOEHE) rapidly launched a nationwide campaign to implement Microsoft solutions like Microsoft Teams and Office365. Hosted on Microsoft Cloud, the new system was able to immediately scale to accommodate 400,000 students and teachers.
206 schools were set up with Microsoft Teams in three days, for a total of 33,000 classes. Teachers were immediately able to create virtual classrooms and learning environments. Everything was secured by Microsoft’s cloud-based security services.
To supplement live teaching, 2,456 lessons were filmed across 100 studios. These were converted into Microsoft Forms, which were sent to teachers for student distribution via Microsoft Teams. The lessons were also broadcast on two TV channels in order of learning schedule.
Teachers conducted over 756 online assessments on a weekly basis to ensure students remained on track in the new environment.
Digital teacher training
As anyone who has experienced home schooling during the pandemic will know, remote learning relies on more than just technology; users also needed to understand how to use it.
So, the system was supplemented with a library of 30 instructional videos in both English and Arabic, as well as live training.
Individualized user journeys were crafted to guide every teacher, parent, and student to the information they needed to navigate and fully engage with their new virtual schools.
Securing the bandwidth
Ensuring there was enough bandwidth for hundreds of thousands of students and teachers to be online at once was the most important part of the puzzle. It was the reason MOEHE turned to Microsoft to replace its LMS.
To ensure the new system would run smoothly, Microsoft engineers had to upgrade connectivity in their own data centers, as well as working with telecoms providers to level up the network.
Their work paid off, and Qatar successfully managed to maintain continuity of education while students and teachers were staying safe at home. Having started out ahead of the remote learning curve, the impetus of the pandemic pushed the country to the top of the class. It will be fascinating to see what’s next for the education of this nation.
