The Egyptian Ministry of Education (MoE) and Technical Education today announced a new partnership with Microsoft to further accelerate digital transformation in education and ensure the continuity of learning across Egypt during COVID-19.
The Minister, Dr. Tarek Shawki, announced there is an agreement with Microsoft to provide Office 365 to all educators and students.
Prior to this partnership, the country made use of bulk accounts for teachers and students – a cumbersome process, which did not allow for the monitoring of account and application usage. Students and teachers were also required to visit the physical location of their schools in order to obtain their accounts. This however, created a bottleneck, particularly when it came to the mobility concerns that arose during COVID-19.
These challenges prompted the Ministry to work together with Microsoft on developing a self-service portal that would enable students to set up their own Office 365 accounts. The automated system for extracting accounts is currently being implemented in a safe and simple manner, leveraging Azure services and security capabilities and together with Microsoft’s software development business partner Cairo Codes and BlueCloud. Ultimately, it will cater for more than 20 million students and more than a million teachers.
The portal is a significant step forward on the MoE’s digital transformation journey, not only making it easier to provision more than 20 million accounts online, but also enabling the Ministry to monitor the usage of accounts and applications, such as Exchange, Teams, OneDrive, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Ministry is also using Office 365 e-mail as the main identity for students and teachers to log in across their different platforms.
What’s more, the MoE now has a database for all teachers and students across Egypt, making it easier to communicate with each governorate separately if needed. This was previously a major challenge due to lack of tools and communications methods.
The portal has already reached 4 million users (students and teachers) and counting.
