In June 2018, Microsoft got a request from the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) and the Supreme Council of Universities (SCU), with the intent of launching a standardized digital and secure test across Medical colleges in Egypt – which has been a direct request by the Egyptian president. Microsoft was tasked to find a solution that fits this need and that can scale to a Nation level with all its requirements.
The idea was to bring the concept of digital testing into the picture, and reassuring all involved stakeholders and the public that this is the best practice moving forward to ensure unbiased, standardized and controlled Examination process to guarantee a global marketplace benchmark for these graduates – be it Medical, Engineering, Humanities or others.
GamaLearn, a Microsoft Education partner, has a leading Assessment platform (SwiftAssess) that is deployed across MENA in multiple Ministries of Education and Academic establishments. GamaLearn and Microsoft joined forces with the MoHE and SCU to plan the best approach to this digital transformation initiative and aim for a successful pilot by all aspects. 5 colleges were chosen for this pilot including both Public and Private sector for a variety of results and population basis, with IT needs on the ground covered by GamaLearn and IT-Blocks (a Microsoft IT Solutions Partner) to ensure stability and readiness for tests conducted in each university/college. All stakeholders involved including SCU members, College deans, IT personnel, Ministerial Cabinet, Microsoft, and GamaLearn were engaged in 3 months long workloads involving content creation, IT readiness, business users orientation and familiarization, student training, and POC mock testing.
The final test took place on the 15th of August, where the Minister and the 5 university presidents were in a central command room, overseeing all 5 geographically dispersed colleges conducting a standardized digital Medical exam at the same time, securely and with visibility through a real-time dashboard in SwiftAssess, that allowed each university to see their individual college attendance, performance, progress, and results. At the end of the 2-hour exam, all results were synced back to the cloud and immediately all reports, analytics and dashboards were displayed and available for decision making and further action plans.
We celebrate yet another major milestone in Digital transformation at such a major scale in Education. We believe that this will be the de-facto for unifying and standardizing tests across Egypt in all of its specializations, colleges, and universities – and this ceremony is the very first proof of that.
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