Love to learn • Chapter summary
Education is a sector that has remained largely unchanged for decades or even centuries. For any program to be taken seriously, it had to be in person, with direct interaction and correspondingly high fees associated with instruction and moving to a location that facilitated it.
Saudi Arabia was no exception to this rule, with its dozens of universities mostly focused on in-person instruction. The pandemic changed education globally and permanently to a more flexible model. This shift was profoundly felt in the Kingdom, a vast country with a generational dividend that gives it tens of thousands of students spread across the nation.
In the past programs like those offered by the Saudi Electronic University (SEU) were considered second best to traditional instruction. After strict lockdowns were enforced, some of the most prestigious universities in the Kingdom turned to Lilac A. Al-Safadi, the President of SEU, for advice on best practice for building the IT infrastructure and training the staff needed to have the country’s entire student population learn online.
In an interview, she described the shift underway: “Prior to the pandemic, the education sector was one of least disrupted by technology.
COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation in almost all sectors including higher education, and it will redefine the mission of the university and the philosophy of education. There is no doubt that digital transformation in education is here to stay, and there is no better time for rethinking the future of higher education than today.”
Dr. Ahmad bin Fahad, the Governor of the Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC), told TBY in an interview that his organization had made a simple choice to shift away from single end-of-course exams. Instead, they used a wide variety of indicators to give a final grade including class attendance, take-home assignments, homework, and quizzes. This model resembles what grade-schools have done for decades, but it is less common in higher education. It also points to a more time-consuming, nuanced model of instruction that is not available to everyone but is how the best institutions in higher learning have dealt with the crisis.
In this chapter we speak with some of the Kingdom’s decisionmakers in the education sector about how they re-shaped their institutions to meet a new challenge, and how the work they did will impact the learning of future generations.