MoE and Microsoft Collaborate to Ensure Education Continuity in Saudi Arabia

A New Era of Education Transformation

In 2020, the European Center for Digital Competitiveness ranked Saudi Arabia first out of 140 nations for its digital effectiveness. Saudi Arabia achieved this ranking as a result of its innovation and digital economy road map that aims to develop local digital capabilities and attract foreign technical investments. Saudi Arabia's launch of a Digital Transformation Plan, which is a key component of its larger Vision 2030 blueprint, is a leading reason behind its stellar performance vis-à-vis digital effectiveness. This plan aims to build a future-oriented digital government, establish a thriving digital economy based on the Fourth Industrial revolution technologies, and create a vibrant digital society. 

One of the MoE's main objectives is to continue the "shift to digital education in support of both teachers and students."

Even though most governments closed schools and set up some sort of distance learning programs for students, the policy responses to supporting teachers have been varied. According to the International Monetary Fund, almost all governments have increased spending to ensure continued education during the pandemic. Much of this funding has been used to deploy technologies for online and distance learning. 

Education is a continuous process in which students progress yearly. Extended learning disruptions may result in disengaged students and impede social, political, and economic development. In Saudi Arabia, the education of millions of students was interrupted during the initial days of the pandemic. Staff and teachers nonetheless remained committed, even as the consequences of COVID-19 were unknown at that time. The leadership at the MoE gauged the impact of COVID-19 on education ahead of time and started planning remedial measures as early as March 2020.  

Teachers and schools in Saudi Arabia have been creative in adopting technologies as alternatives to traditional classrooms (e.g., by providing lessons through video-conferencing and online learning platforms and sharing learning materials and worksheets through school-based intranets and messaging platforms). In addition, radio programs and national television stations are being used to broadcast lessons and educational material, particularly in areas lacking technological infrastructure.

The MoE's Response to the COVID-19 Outbreak

Figure 2: Phases of Turning Pandemics into Opportunities

Source: IDC, 2020

The MoE realized it had  to modernize its technology infrastructure to extend distance learning to more than six million users. The MoE was thus keen on attaining a robust technical infrastructure and ensuring the seamless availability of its online educational platforms.

Business Needs and Challenges

While providing online education seems easy, delivering it on a mass scale to school-age children is quite daunting. The MoE, being a nodal authority, is responsible for enabling quality education across Saudi Arabia. MoE collaborates with schools, colleges, and universities to create academic policies and align courses to the Saudi Vision 2030.

At the start of the pandemic, universities and higher education institutions could easily switch from on-campus to online instruction within a few weeks; however, the same was not the case for high schools and kindergartens. 

The MoE needed to think differently without compromising quality, content, and overall learning experiences. MoE teams began their situational assessments around March 2020, when the virus started to spread across the world. These teams worked relentlessly and came up with an ambitious plan to extend MoE's learning management solution (LMS) to K-12 students in record time. The MoE's major concern  was about universities and institutes of higher education since such entities could independently decide how to impart education to their students. However, lower-grade schools, K-12 students, and parents were dependent on the MoE. 

The MoE worked with strict timelines after the COVID-19 outbreak (since the outbreak coincided with the academic year's start). While parents, students, and teachers did not know how to respond to the situation, the MoE remained firm in its commitment to impart high quality and interruptible education to students via online means. While the need appeared simple, it was not — the MoE faced numerous challenges during this time.

Skill, Scale, and Time

A lack of onsite technical resources created a tough situation for the IT and the eLearning and Distance Learning Department of the MoE. Firstly, the MoE's LMS had not been designed to support over six million students across the country, even though it had been used to deliver online classes in the past. Secondly, not all classes were conducted online for all grades. Finally, the MoE was under a great deal of pressure to make quick decisions. The MoE had hardly four weeks to create an academic plan, collaborate with schools to schedule classes, train schoolteachers, and announce the way forward to schools and parents. The General Director of eLearning and Distance Learning and the IT department evaluated the onsite infrastructure of the ministry and concluded that it was not scalable. 

Technical Challenges

1. The first technical challenge was to standardize and use a single LMS that students could seamlessly access on a very large scale. 
2. The MoE's on-premises datacenter had initially been designed to support a few thousand users. During the pandemic, MoE needed to support 6 million students accessing the virtual learning platform. This unexpected surge in demand for IT infrastructure impacted the datacenter performance.  
3. The technical architecture of the existing LMS or online learning application did not support the usage of even 25% of concurrent users. In its original state, the application was designed to serve 20,000 students, while the new requirement was to support six million students, many of whom would use it concurrently. 
4. Existing firewalls could not meet the newly evolving and complex requirements. The MoE realized that older versions and limited firewall capabilities could pose a grave security risk to data. 
5. Finally, not all schools were equipped with collaboration and content management solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Office 365. 

Change Management Challenges

Online teaching was a new experience for most Saudi Arabian teachers, even though a few had used collaboration tools in the past. Indeed, teaching in a classroom and teaching online are completely different experiences; teachers need to possess different skills to instruct students remotely. Virtual platform presents challenge to teachers like actively monitoring their students; for example, teachers may not know if students are paying attention or whether they have grasped a concept or not. When MoE teams conducted a few sessions to familiarize schools and faculty members with the online platform, they received significant teachers' support. The MoE realized that it needed to conduct numerous onboarding sessions, particularly as parents, students, and teachers of K-12 schools were unsure about how to respond to the crisis at the start of the new academic year.

Back-to-School Challenges

The MoE's eLearning and Distance Learning team understood the need for effective communication and created a "Back to School" plan. The team used every means of communication, including emails, social media messages, and media announcements. The MoE realized that communication should increase during periods of crisis. MoE teams consequently conducted countless awareness sessions and even uploaded a few messages on YouTube so that no parent missed the messages. Administrators and teachers participated wholeheartedly in this initiative since they knew the effectiveness of repetitive communication. Many teachers volunteered to be part of the videos.

Vendor Selection

The MoE conducted a thorough evaluation of various public cloud platforms and technology vendors available in the market. The MoE also considered independent technology infrastructure suppliers that had provided it with technologies in the past. During these evaluations, the MoE realized that, while most public cloud platforms could integrate its LMS platforms (such as v-school, National iEN Portal Platform, Virtual Kindergarten, and Future Gate) with Office 365, other solutions would have created a complex vendor ecosystem during an emergency period. The MoE also needed a vendor who would respond swiftly and help it during the crisis height.

The MoE already had a strategic partnership with Microsoft, which allowed it to choose the vendor's solutions. Microsoft was the MoE’s existing vendor for Office 365 and a few other solutions; in addition, its Azure Cloud platform met the MoE’s technical requirements. The MoE was eligible for the highest priority techno-commercial support at Microsoft due to this strategic partnership. 

Solution Features

To lower the impact of COVID-19 on education in Saudi Arabia, the MoE needed a sustainable plan and solution. Fortunately, the MoE had a robust technical support function with extensive experience, and before COVID-19 had made an impact on the kingdom, MoE's top leadership and management team had already developed a strong vision for the education sector. 

The MoE started communicating with students, teachers, and parents through different media channels like satellite, broadcast, and social media (YouTube). However, these channels had the inherent disadvantage of being one-way form of communication. While the Future Gate program utilized technology to connect students to LMS platforms, it was not available to all students in the kingdom. The MoE needed a solution and partner that could support its sustainable plans. While initial steps were taken to broadcast lessons to students, the MoE quickly needed to determine the critical parameters for selecting the eventual service provider and solution. Below are some key features of Microsoft's Azure Platform that the MoE considered to be in line with its needs: 

1. Agility: The MoE had the resources and experience to set up technology projects on a national scale; however, it lacked a preconfigured and agile solution and a service provider that could swiftly and easily deploy such a solution. Even though the MoE had its own datacenters and partnerships with local hosting players, it decided that moving to the cloud would save time and allow for the quick reinstatement of lessons. 

2. Scalable Infrastructure: To implement a national-level solution, the MoE needed scalable infrastructure. While the MoE already had its own datacenters and disaster recovery systems, moving all resources onto a platform that would be accessed by millions of students and teachers at the same time was a key problem. The LMS, student databases, courses, and other materials were to be migrated to the new infrastructure. In addition, the extensive infrastructure was supposed to go live in a weeks' time. Being a global cloud solution provider, Microsoft was ready to provide such a scalable infrastructure. Once onboarded, Microsoft migrated the Madrasati LMS to more than 50 servers in phase one, adding business continuity and disaster recovery as a service to ensure uninterrupted access to a large number of students.

3. Accessibility: When courses were fully shifted online, the application and learning material was expected to be accessed by more than two million students simultaneously. The solution thus needed to manage huge amounts of traffic and allow easy and quick access to the LMS and other resources.

4. Security: Schools collect vast quantities of sensitive information (such as student records, academic transcripts, and research data) that they have a legal and ethical obligation to protect. As such, the MoE also had to ensure that its restrictive and sophisticated security requirements were met. The MoE needed security controls such as integrated firewalls and anti-distributed denial-of-service systems.

Solution Implementation

The MoE started planning a COVID-19 response in early March 2020, when pandemic had just surfaced and its extent of negative impact was still uncertain. By mid-March, a remote Unified Education Platform which was later called as  Madrasati LMS supporting millions of students was up and running. Microsoft finished the full implementation and onboarding of millions of students in less than a fortnight, with committed support from the MoE. 

When the second quarter of 2020 ended, the MoE had to decide whether schools would open for the next session (new school year) or remain closed. Taking safety into consideration, the MoE decided to keep schools closed. At the same time, the MoE realized it needed a solution that did not let education for students get hampered.  The only solution was to replace the traditional classroom with a virtual classroom. 

To ensure education continuity, the online platform needed to support different age groups and be attuned to a student's course and skill level. In addition, students, teachers, parents, administrators, and education supervisors needed to be trained with the new methods of communication in the new online platform; round-the-clock accessibility also had to be ensured. A permanent solution to interruptions was critical. Such a solution would greatly mediate the pandemic's impact on the education sector and shape the educational landscape in the "new normal."

Figure 3: Implementation Timeline

Step 1: Kick-Off

As time was critical, various Microsoft and T4edu teams (T4edu is a technical arm of the MoE) quickly rolled out the solution architecture. The roles and responsibilities of each team were defined based on their skills and core competencies. The MoE's role was to outline the exact requirements and oversee project implementation. T4edu managed the MoE's technological resources and LMS.

Step 2: Implementation 

After architecture rollout, the various teams spent the second week ensuring the security and availability of the solution. Business continuity and disaster recovery sites were built for all production workload applications in order to keep them running during planned and unplanned outages. 

About Madrasati Platform

Madrasati is a national eLearning educational platform (LMS) that provides virtual spaces for K-12 education in Saudi Arabia. This eLearning portal is developed by Saudi nationals and owned by the Ministry of education. 

Madrasati e-platform was developed over a very short time to ensure sustainable and quality online educational experience for six millions K-12 students across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This platform via collaboration with Microsoft and its MS tools is designed to empower and enable teachers and educational administrators to plan and deliver high quality learning journey to students with different needs.   

Madrasati provides several tools, resources and services that made the platform accessible effectively and efficiently. The dashboard within the system indicated that more than 98% of K-12 education students have accessed the platform. 

The platform is a comprehensive system that provides synchronous and asynchronous virtual classes, educational digital content, electronic assignments, discussion forums, electronic questionnaires, as well as various educational resources in the content management system CMS, such as videos, augmented reality, 3D resources, educational stories, e-books and official e-mails and Microsoft Office 365. To ensure and encourage active participation in discussions, the platform with the support of Microsoft Teams provides students with communication tools that let them interact with their classmates and with their teachers in the virtual class.

Step 3: Create the Virtual Platform

Saudi Arabia is a large country with 13 regions. After intense brainstorming sessions, it was decided that the easiest way to create and manage Microsoft Office tenants would be to organize students according to their genders and the regions they reside in. This strategy would ease management, provide a better experience, and improve collaboration as each region would have a tenant for each gender. Hence, 27 tenants with Microsoft Office 365 licenses were created. For identity and access management purposes, the MoE and Microsoft decided to use Azure Active Directory to limit access to the Madrasati platform, MS Teams, Office 365, and a couple of other applications. This was a smart solution to address the need to avail access to critical applications to 6+ million students within a matter of 3 weeks without spending much time and money on creating dedicated Office 365 accounts for all the students. Microsoft and MoE together ensured timely, cost-effective, and compliant access to the applications that students need for their learning. 

 Rolling out the Madrasati eLearning platform to more than six million students in three weeks was a daunting task. After careful technical due diligence, Microsoft and MoE IT teams decided to use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure DevOps to containerize and orchestrate the platform. The team divided the Madrasati platform into seven smaller chunks and tested each in parallel. Acting on a special request by the MoE, Microsoft roped in DevOps specialists from across the globe. These specialists created 600 instances of the application to ensure zero downtime. 

The teams eliminated all waste, such as manual deployment and analysis, to expedite development and deployment. The team separated various independent services and deployed them in parallel. The MoE's eLearning and Distance Learning and IT teams and Microsoft's global teams worked 24/7 for three weeks across different time zones. They containerized the entire application in one day, configuring most processes in parallel. All changes were consolidated, and different iterative versions were maintained in the Azure Container Registry in case possible rollbacks were required (users could simply choose a version to restore from a drop-down menu). 

Microsoft experts conducted non-functional tests while MoE teams carried out functional tests. Projects involving application deployment generally have many technical issues and incidents. Luckily, the Azure Kubernetes platform enabled the MoE to isolate issues without causing any unplanned downtimes and academic losses.  

The MoE team used "Azure Application Insights" to check application response times and gauge point-of-presence exceptions. This allowed them to determine how the application performed when simultaneously accessed by millions of students across the kingdom. Any drop in application performance would have deteriorated the overall learning experience of the students. Without this solution, MoE teams would have been tied up fixing any issues that arose post-implementation. MoE was thus ahead of the curve in terms of disaster prevention.

Step 4: Applying Policies

To avoid any potential abuse of the online education system, the MoE and Microsoft made policy recommendations. For example, they introduced a "lobby concept" that would compel students to wait until permitted to attend a learning session. The MoE could decide to use this feature depending on how effective and useful it was during testing. With these features, the ministry felt in control of overall permissions and secure access.

Step 5: Change Management (Training and Education)

Given that the MoE was operating in uncharted waters, it needed to take different stakeholders and potential users through an exhaustive training and awareness process. Indeed, simply having a solution would be of limited use unless users were aware of its functionalities and relevance. 

The MoE held numerous webinars for teachers, students, education managers and their assistants, institution leaders, and administrative employees. Training sessions were conducted to explain the workflow and academic processes of the Madrasati platform, as well as the importance of digital identity, instructional design, electronic teaching, and protection and safety in distance education. 

Teachers' and administrators' training plan for the Madrasati platform was divided into two parallel phases.

• Phase 1: General awareness and training for Madrasati platform users (Teachers & Administrators) and provision of support in the shortest time. 
• Phase 2: Certified training for teachers and administrators.

The MoE also established a communication center named "Tawasul" that provided 24/7 support to learners. The center started operations on March 15, 2020 and has since received inquiries and technical support reports from users of the distance education platforms.

The MoE also created user guides, educational messages, and video clips to educate and prepare all stakeholders, including teachers, administrators, and school general managers. In addition, the MoE held many distance training sessions for teachers, educational supervisors, and school leaders.

The MoE and Microsoft developed guides for each stakeholder in order to make their teaching and learning journeys easier and more fulfilling. For example, teams developed user guides for teachers, students, leaders, parents, and people with disabilities. As an ongoing activity, the MoE regularly creates content and makes sure teachers have the right guidance. Some teachers are also helping other instructors and students cope with the changes.

Madrasati Platform– by Saudi nationals for Saudi students

1. Platform that extends schools in the virtual world.
2. 100% Saudi designed & implemented platform.
3. 100% Cloud based.
4. Active 6+ Million users.
5. Education Continuity even during COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.
6. Comprehensive platform that covers students' engagement from admission to assessment
7. 153+ million virtual classrooms were created with a daily average ranging between 1to 1.1 million classes during the school time.
8.  12+ billion assignments have been solved by students, with a daily average of 75.7 million assignments. 
9. 699+ million Continuous Evaluation exams at all levels of education, with a daily average of 11.6 million exams.

Post Implementation

The overall project was implemented in two phases. The first phase involved moving infrastructure to the Azure Cloud, and the second phase entailed extending the e-learning systems and virtual classrooms to students across the kingdom. The new LMS Madrasati was piloted at particular high schools over a one-week period. After successfully completing the pilot and incorporating learnings, the LMS was extended to middle and elementary schools. 

The team completed the project within the agreed timeline and ensured that the LMS solution was scalable and maintainable. IDC was informed that three or four engineers from Microsoft provided 24/7 support for any operational issue. The Azure cloud was a new experience for MoE IT engineers who had previously worked on on-premises systems. Nonetheless, they worked as one team and played a crucial role in migrating v-school to MS Azure. The initial hiccups that were encountered were stabilized within four weeks. Microsoft’s Azure experts shared hands-on knowledge with MoE engineers during this exercise. Gradually, MoE’s IT team gained enough expertise to handle three different support levels themselves. Microsoft helped the MoE to establish an active disaster recovery site to ensure continuity in case of any failure.

Developers and cloud infrastructure engineers at the MoE gained sufficient technical knowledge of how to release fixes on the cloud and use Azure reporting services and Azure Analytics. MoE’s IT department is now able to plan downtimes and conduct maintenance activities independent of Microsoft's technical support. The MoE and Microsoft jointly established structured governance before handing over the project to the eLearning and Distance Learning, and IT departments. 

Going Beyond the Call of Duty

During the second phase of the project, the project team modernized the Madrasati platform in record time. This team, which included the MoE's technical experts and Microsoft's cloud and application specialists, followed stringent timelines to modernize the application in three weeks (in normal situations, such modernizations may take three to four months). While technical experts worked relentlessly for three weeks to ensure system availability, the MoE's administration team was busy creating a strategy for a user awareness campaign. The General Director of the eLearning and Distance Learning department informed IDC that a "back to school website" had been created that covered every possibility. The MoE also had a user manual, support guide, and chatbot to inform parents and students about the new learning methods and raise awareness of the e-learning system. 

User awareness appears simple, but it needs sustained communication efforts through multiple channels. The MoE used many tools to ensure that parents, students, and well-wishers were aware of the new education methods.

The MoE also enlisted the best teachers' help to create a YouTube channel and broadcast lessons to students who could not join the virtual classes. The broadcast lessons are extremely helpful for those students who do not have access to computers or the internet.  The MoE also opened a few schools in remote locations where students had difficulties accessing lessons distributed via the internet and television broadcasts. Students visited these schools once a week to receive lessons and take back homework. 

The General Director of eLearning and Distance Learning at MOE informed IDC that every stakeholder was involved in the new teaching/ learning processes. She further stated that the ministry worked with Takaful Foundation to provide students with computers and data SIMs for their online learning lessons. At the same time, this initiative provided 165056 computers and 91304 data SIMs to students across remote locations.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology also worked in conjunction with the MoE to provide free access to the educational sites hosting distance education platforms.

In addition, the MoE involved parents in the educational process by granting them access to the reports and dashboards about their children's progress. Around 40.78% of parents logged in using their credentials to access reports and interact with teachers.

Impact, Benefit, and Way Forward

The only goal of this engagement was to ensure high-quality education continuity. Dr. Mohammed Al-Dhelaan`, the Chief Information Offer MoE, informed IDC during the interview that, "more than anything, we ensured this situation does not cause academic losses to our children." 

Though the journey was arduous and filled with new daily challenges, it was nonetheless rewarding, especially considering the education continuity it delivered to students in Saudi Arabia. Below are some of the business benefits that students and the MoE received from this engagement:

1. Agile Response: Microsoft’s Azure could be easily deployed in very little time. Workload migration was also relatively simple. 
2. Seamless Availability: The MoE worked relentlessly with Microsoft to ensure it received Azure’s reliable cloud infrastructure. The Madrasati Platform was available to K-12 students and faculty members for more than 99.7% of the time, and planned downtimes were used for routine maintenance activities. The MoE did not experience any unplanned downtime.   Around 6.3 million users could access the application in the second week of the project's implementation. 
3. Rapid Response to Students' Needs: Speed of execution was critical during implementation and even during support. Phase one was about deploying the cloud infrastructure, while phase two focused on modernizing the Madrasati Platform. The MoE could accelerate both phases since it had a committed team. The team used the latest technologies such as Azure DevOps and AKS to accelerate application modernization and save considerable time. The team achieved the steep task of looking at scale, volume, and complexity; in actuality, this appears to be a unique project.
4. Greater Collaboration and Interaction with Users, Administrators, Policymakers, and Even Ministers: The MoE’s engineers had an opportunity to build their Azure skills by working shoulder to shoulder with Microsoft engineers. 
5. Access to Global Expertise: The MoE engaged with a global team of Azure architects, Azure Kubernetes experts, and engineers. In addition, MoE and Microsoft senior business leaders monitored implementation progress through structured reviews. These collaborations strengthened the business relationships between these two organizations. 

The MoE tracks user satisfaction through formal feedback and informal discussions. Dr. Mohammed stated, "we have a variety of users accessing systems from multiple locations and through multiple form factors; however, all users have noticed an improvement in performance and are quite happy about it." He also mentioned that the Microsoft team had provided the MoE with low-cost servers for testing purposes. The MoE used these servers to test business-critical applications. He further mentioned that MS Azure dashboards are used extensively to check servers’ real-time resource utilization and access system reports. MoE staff regularly check servers' health and avoid any unplanned downtime.

Difficult times call for stronger leadership and stronger responses. The team at MoE proactively handled the challenge of restricted mobility caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. The team collaborated extensively with every stakeholder with the singular goal of ensuring that no student suffered academic losses. The sheer volume and complexity of work involved, and the steep timelines followed, made this a unique case. IDC believes that, by following the MoE's example, organizations worldwide can learn how to adopt cloud and leverage Microsoft's next-generation technologies to ensure educational continuity.

Figure 6: Quick Wins and Strategic Gains Made Through eLearning in Saudi Arabia

About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company.