Egypt's Minister of Education has "ambitious plans" to ensure that all students are connected to digital learning facilities during the novel Covid-19 period. This huge infrastructural overhaul of methods is pushing teachers to start preparing for electronic exams with paper exams abolished in the near future.
Egypt’s Minister of Education Tarek Shawky said that his ministry has “ambitious plans” in the coming period to ensure that all students in Egypt are connected to digital learning facilities.
Shawky noted that students in Grades 10 to 12 are already connected to such facilities, with the ministry set to extend these facilities to the 12 million students in Grades 4 to 9.
The minister’s remarks came during a virtual meeting with the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt (AmCham), on Tuesday, in which he addressed Egypt’s education strategy and its development process.
Shawky started his speech by introducing the developments in Egypt’s education in the past few years, which directly benefited the country’s move to digital learning during the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) period.
“We were really moving on many fronts, having started a brand new education system in September 2018 which we called Education 2.0,” Shawky said, “It worked for about 8 million students from the KG to Grade 3 stages.”
He added, “It is a very modern education system that was implemented in collaboration with international partners. Its student-based model of education is very different, including the books and methods of teaching used.”
Shawky said that the ministry is investing in Egypt’s high schools, changing the assessments model whilst abolishing the rote-learning of information which did not achieve real outcomes.
“We started using technology to assist with this,” the minister said, “The main change was in Grades 11 to 12, where we resorted to different questions and open book exams.”
A total of 250 high schools in Egypt are now equipped with servers, smart screens, WiFi, the minister said.
In a huge infrastructural overhaul of teaching methods, Shawky noted that a total of 18 million tablets have been distributed to students at a cost of about EGP 10m, in addition to a total of 36,000 smart screens installed in class rooms.
Teachers have also started preparing for the introduction of electronic exams, with paper exams abolished in Grades 10 and 11. Paper exams will also be removed from the Grade 12 syllabus by the summer of 2021.
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