The Ministry of Education announced that in accordance
with the preventive and precautionary measures recommended
It was decided to temporarily suspend
the study in all regions and provinces of the Kingdom
from Monday 14/7/1441 Ah until further notice
The global outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020
forced us to make certain key decisions at the Ministry of Education.
to deal with the pandemic consequences.
We had two major questions to answer:
Can we implement and adopt online learning on all educational levels?
Or should we just wait for the pandemic to pass and get back to normal?
Our primary objective was to ensure a continuous safe-learning
environment for our students and teachers.
As such, we needed to accelerate our efforts to activate eLearning
and expedite efforts for all students in the kingdom
and addressing all challenges related, most importantly Digital challenges.
Transformation from regular learning to eLearning wasn't an easy task.
The Ministry faced many challenges in implementing eLearning
during the pandemic.
Time was one of the challenges,
especially when the decision of transforming the educational
process to eLearning has been made to serve over 6 million students and
over 500,000 teachers
Our partnership with the Ministry of Education for over 2 decades.
We were able to meet the Ministry's eLearning
needs and its importance, due to the urgency of the pandemic.
We had tow areas to work on:
Firstly, we had to develop a clear understanding of the Ministry's
exact requirements of eLearning and transform it into a doable plan.
There are more than 6 million students in Saudi Arabia
and we needed to provide access to online learning
for every single one of them. To accommodate this,
we needed to develop a large number of IT Resources
to enable a best-in-market system with secured access management
for students and other users.
When we activated the platform,
Microsoft Arabia project team noticed that students and teachers
were interacting faster than expected,
So we realized the need for more collaboration tolls will arise.
These tolls included MS Teams, Office 365, and other solutions designed
to enhance the learning and teaching experience.
To enable the transition from regular learning
to online learning as quickly as possible,
we had to collaborate with the Ministry in two phases.
Our aim was to ensure that the eLearning environment
was as close as possible to the traditional classroom-based reality.
The first phase involved moving the Ministry's IT infrastructure to Azure Cloud.
And in the second phase, our focus was on building 27 tenants to ensure
the online learning experience was accessible all across the Kingdom.
Once all these tenants were activated in place, a decision was made to modernize
the virtual learning application using
Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps,
with the aim of extending the learning experience to students
across all grades and sections.
We also proposed using Azure Active Directory
to create identities since users would only require access to a few applications
including Madarasti, MS Teams, and Office 365, among others.
Besides the need for infrastructure readiness, we had to generate interest
in the eLearning program among all stakeholders to ensure full participation.
To facilitate this, we created the "Back to School User Guide".
Incorporating multiple channels and technical support services such as Chatbots.
To ensure educational content accessibility to all students,
we set up 25 live channels.
Through it, high-quality lessons are recorded and broadcast by distinguished Teachers
that are available via live television broadcasts,
making them available on the Youtube channel and on the Madarasti platform.
We were able to provide various solutions to ensure the continuity of the
educational process for all the students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
so the schools remained open for students
who do not have access to digital solutions.
We were able to complete "Madarasti" platform successfully
because of a competent, hardworking team,
and working with the right partners.
From a technology point of view, we really benefited from seamless availability,
a high level of collaboration with stakeholders,
an improved knowledge base for all our teams,
and direct access to the technical savvy of our partners.
We are extremely grateful for the dedication and commitment
of our partners and their technical teams.
We are delighted to announce that the Ministry of Education has adopted Azure
Cloud and utilized the latest technologies, to achieve our aim of making learning
available to students across the Kingdom, without any obstacles.
It's been a pleasure working with the Ministry of Education
on their rapid shift to a new paradigm
in the educational journey of the Kingdom students.
The project was quite unique with unprecedented challenging time
But we were able to succeed by having the right team,
collaboration tools, and intelligent edge & cloud technologies in place.
This success story is also proof that educational institutions around the world
can rely on cloud services and take advantage of next-generation technologies
from Microsoft to ensure the continuity of the educational process.
The sheer scale of updated applications in this project,
it was one of the most complex applications of Azure Kubernetes worldwide
particularly as we were in a race against time
to ensure a truly seamless learning experience.
All of us at Microsoft are extremely proud to partner with the Ministry of Education
and contribute to digital transformations projects
that align with the goals of Saudi Vision 2030.