Enhancing digital pedagogy

New technologies offer academic institutions substantial opportunities to enhance students’ learning, says Mahmoud Alalawi, director of Procurement and Contracts at the UAE’s Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT)

What kind of a role does technology play in educating students today?

Digital technologies not only support learning, but also transform both how we learn and how we interpret learning. For example, e-learning is already wellestablished in the everyday teaching process at HCT in the form of the blended learning model, where work is completed under the guidance of faculty in a classroom environment alongside the absorption by learners via various online resources at their own leisure.

The collective space of a classroom is still, however, very much an arena for instruction, but the widespread introduction of technology enhances teaching through the availability of online resources and the blackboard. Learning Management System (LMS) is enabling a more dynamic learning environment, with the faculty facilitating activities rather than merely delivering content. Technology-enhanced learning includes:

1. Blended learning

2. E-portfolios

3. Mobile learning

4. Learning Management System (Blackboard)

What are the benefits of cloud computing in the education sector? How is Higher Colleges of Technology using cloud technologies?

In order to transform the traditional data centre into a smart virtualised tier3 data centre, HCT migrated our data centre to a state of-the-art software-defined network and private cloud platform, which delivers tangible business benefits of reduced footprint (from 25 racks to 13 racks) and associated operations costs.

It covers the deployment of nextgeneration compute power for significant improvement of application responsiveness resulting in enhanced user experience with a robust, fully redundant architecture at various ecosystem levels. This helps us to provide a digital teaching and learning experience and ensure 100 per cent accessibility of all IT services without any interruptions.

How are data and analytics powering the edtech industry?

The rate of data and analytics adoption is not uniform. Many universities are just starting on their journey, focusing on using reporting and BI. HCT now has a scalable big data platform in place and has already started realising value from it. The exchanges of data and information in most cases are done through the integrated systems of HCT with other entities.

The main advantage comes in the form of advanced analytics and machine learning use cases. So far, HCT has implemented three use cases in this regard – chatbot, social media sentiment analysis and the Intelligent Course Advisor (ICA). In the coming months and years, HCT is well-positioned to leverage this data by building ML use cases that facilitate better decision making, automate timeconsuming processes and improve operational and academic efficiency across the organisation.

How is artificial intelligence transforming the education sector? How does it fit into the future of education?

HCT’s big data platform contains data from multiple sources and serves as a powerful unified data layer, thereby allowing the university to analyse voluminous data in any format (structured, unstructured or semi-structured) via reporting, dashboarding and machine learning applications.

It is now clear that this platform has generated several immediate benefits for HCT.

Artificial intelligence will eventually (as a critical layer) play a key role in providing ‘Uber-like’ on-demand skills and credentials to students regardless of their demographic.

Examples of AI application within HCT include:

1. Intelligent course advisor

2. Social media analytics

3. AI chatbot

Over the past year, what has been the most significant digital achievement within your organisation?

For the procurement and contracts department, the major achievements include: E-Pc system:

• Digitised the submissions to procurement committee

• Digitised end user submission which resulted in removing all paperwork and streamlined the process

• Digitised contract-drafting as a result of PC recommendation E-sourcing:

• Enabled online tendering and submissions

• Automated technical and commercial evaluation

• Streamlined tendering experience for end-users and vendors