Jordan Education Initiative receives UNESCO prize for ICT use

(MENAFN - Jordan Times) The Jordan Education Initiative (JEI) has won the 2009 UNESCO King Hamad Ben Isa Al Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education.

The award, which was shared with the Rector of the Moscow Institute of Open Education, includes a diploma and $25,000 cash prize and will be presented at a ceremony on January 26, 2010 at the UN agency's headquarters in Paris.

This year's UNESCO award focused on the theme "Teaching, Learning and e-Pedagogy: Teacher Professional Development for Knowledge Societies", while the selection came upon a recommendation by an international jury which recently convened in Paris.

Thirty-nine projects from 29 countries including Russia, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Spain, Iran, Thailand, Georgia, Rwanda, France, Qatar, India, the US and Jordan participated in the competition.

JEI CEO Haif Bannayan pointed out that the initiative was launched in June 2003 at the World Economic Forum as a model of effective partnership between the public and the private sectors.

In addition to the government, 17 local institutions, 17 global companies and 11 NGOs joined the partnership to support Jordan's efforts to upgrade the education sector, Bannayan said.

Since its launch, Her Majesty Queen Rania has followed up on the initiative, which encourages creativity and develops qualified resources by using advanced technology in public schools, he added.

Underlining the importance of the award, Bannayan said the distinction is the latest of the JEI's accomplishments, noting that the initiative has served as a model for similar programs in Palestine, Egypt and the Indian region of Rajasthan.

"The Queen's follow-up of the initiative and its programs has been a major driving force for our achievements, the most recent of which is the prize," Bannayan said, noting that following the initiative's success in its first stage, and upon the Queen's directives, it was transformed into a non-profit institution in July 2005.

Last year, the Queen launched the second stage of the initiative and its strategic plans for the next three years, which focuses on maximizing the benefits of using technology for educational purposes and training teachers on modern educational techniques, he noted.

Currently, the JEI includes research, development and evaluation departments, as well as a project management unit.

The JEI has also been adopted to support the use of technology within the Madrasati initiative, which the Queen launched in 2008.

Through its public-private partnership, the initiative has trained over 3,000 teachers in ICT skills using six e-curricula as tools to enrich the national curriculum.

The Education Ministry selected 100 public schools to test the innovations and provided them with the needed technical infrastructure.

Under the initiative, more than 80,000 public school students have benefited from the use of technology and computerized curricula which led to interactive teaching in lieu of traditional teaching.

Launched in 2005 under the patronage of King Hamad Ben Isa Al Khalifa of the Kingdom of Bahrain, the UNESCO award seeks to reward excelling models and best practices in using telecommunications and IT technologies to enhance education.