RIYADH, 6 February — The first of the five pilot schools under the SR5 billion Watani project became operational in Jeddah yesterday, marking the formal launch of the project conceived by Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, to bring information technology into Saudi schools.
This was announced to reporters by Abdullah Al-Dubaikhi, project director of Watani, yesterday on the occasion of the 16th national computer conference underway in Riyadh. He said five Saudi schools in different parts of the Kingdom with a combined strength of 5,000 students will be interlinked within two months to facilitate online learning, chatting and sharing of the schools' educational resources over the Internet.
The Kingdom has 23,000 schools, 300,000 teachers and a total strength of four million students. The Watani Net project is to be implemented in four phases over a five-year period.
Al-Dubaikhi said Al-Saghr School of Jeddah, the first of the pilot schools, had a strength of about 1,500 students. The school has adequate number of computers to link it to the Internet. The remaining four schools are in Dammam, Riyadh, Hail and some rural areas. The second phase of the project will involve 200 schools before the scheme goes through for an evaluation.
He said the schools' Net project would provide basic technological services including multimedia, e-mail, chatting and other services. It would also link the students and teachers to the educational sites.
Another feature of the project is that it will provide a link to special sites designed to enrich the curricula for talented students or those requiring special education. There will also be links to Q&A banks for all subjects and grades, with a built-in assessment mechanism for reporting students' strengths and weaknesses.
Al-Dubaikhi said that under the second phase of the project the schools' Net system would cover about 50 percent of the Kingdom's four million students, with one computer for every 10 students. They will be equipped with e-books and have access to e-libraries, enabling them to download any information from their homes.
This phase will see the establishment of local networks within schools and the Net portal site. It will also link the ministry's sites, the educational departments and large schools with the portal site. Once completed, it will facilitate distance learning and solve the problem of teacher shortage, as the student-teacher ratio would increase.
To this end, said Al-Dubaikhi, the IT infrastructure consisting of computers and peripherals in a Local Area Network environment is being installed in the schools. "We are also setting up training programs to prepare the teaching staff for creating IT awareness among the students and facilitating IT curriculum integration. It will be an interactive learning program. "
All matters relating to school affairs will be handled through Schools Management Systems (SMS) program. A total of 112 foreign and local companies are involved in the project.
The total cost of the project is SR5 billion spread over five years. This is sought to be covered by charging each student SR200 per year. Besides, e-commerce is expected to net additional income from the suppliers of textbooks, school stationery, furniture and other accessories. There will also be income through content providers for placing their material on the Net, he added.
