Saturday 20 / April / 2024
Muscat: Oman has the infrastructure in place to completely change the way school and university students learn in the classroom.
A forum to be held soon in the Sultanate will strive to make Oman the model for all, and organisers believe the Sultanate’s forward thinking approach will put it ahead of the rest.
An official from the Ministry of Higher Education called the meet, MENA 2019, scheduled to be held in September, “a high quality forum with the support of the ministry.”
Artificial intelligence
Technology can be used in Oman to help students learn using artificial intelligence and programming, organisers say.
This will help adjust their education based on how they absorb the subject material, and it will make sure that they can excel. The system will be tailor-made to monitor the performance of individual students, and will then adjust the speed of its learning to suit the learning style and pace of the student in question.
John Glassey, founder of Brains Innovations Summits, the company organising the forum in conjunction with the ministry, said: “If I am in a classroom of 10 students and we are doing mathematics, the 10 students will all be at different levels. It’s the nature of human beings. Implementing artificial intelligence for testing and participation means that there are devices, tablets and laptops in the classroom that can match and respond to the individual levels of the student.
“Student A might be slightly ahead of student B, and the technology being implemented now can adapt to student B, who needs a little more information and a few more tests to get to student A’s level.”
Glassey is teaming up with the Omani government to bring a technological educational forum called MENA Innovation Forum 2019 to Oman, along with partners from the region, as well as from across the world.
“You’re going to see partners working with technology that you can have in the classroom for active learning, as well as methodologies and best practices for improving the quality of education, in addition to accessibility and creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship,” Glassey said.
According to Glassey, there are already tools in Oman that help students, such as EWathiq, an Omani portal for online education. EWathiq, with a monthly subscription fee, helps students gain supplementary courses to improve their education.
He said: “EWathiq currently has 15,000 subscribers. With the rapid change in technology, maybe one day that could rise to 15 million.”
He added that Oman could be described as a fertile ground for technological innovation in education because of its stable political and economic environment.
Glassey went on to say: “Fairly recently, Oman implemented an active learning policy within the curriculum. Learning has traditionally been teacher-focused, with teachers standing in front of students and the students taking in the information in order to pass their exams. Active learning is making it learner-focused with more integration in the classroom.”
According to Glassey, Oman is already making great strides in retraining and professionally developing teachers in order to prepare them for active learning, which involves the use of IT to help strengthen two-way communication in education.
“For example, one of the partners in the curriculum that has supported the active-learning policy with the Ministry of Education has been Cambridge University. This has resulted in a teacher-training college in Oman that is working to retrain and professionally develop teachers in Oman for active learning.
“The Minister of Higher Education said to me that they want to promote greater innovation and entrepreneurship in Omani higher education,” he added.
Glassey also said that Oman has an advantage because it knows how to focus on the specific types of IT that it needs to implement and develop.
“Oman has achieved a degree of focus and one of the examples I can give is the ITA and the focus on cybersecurity,” he added, citing Oman’s commitment to developing cybersecurity through its Advanced Cybersecurity Academy. The academy recently trained 138 trainees from more than 40 different government agencies.
“The key word here is clusters, and if Oman can have focused clusters then I believe it can be a success."
A statement by the organisers read: “The full weight of the Omani Government is behind the organisation of the forum, which will also include ministerial participation from the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Communications, as well as multiple government stakeholders. This high level meetings based forum will bring together ministers, senior government officials, universities and civil society stakeholders from across the Middle East and North Africa, to engage with leading industry operators and solution providers.”
The event will take place from September 15-17, and currently has confirmations from 16 countries, as well as both regional and international brands and promising SMEs and universities in Oman.
