“Science &Technology” Inaugurates the Biggest Saudi Technology Project to Serve Saudi Education and Curricula

KACST announced inaugurating the project of Nooor Educational Website adopted by KACST through Information and Communication Technology Incubator “Badir”. Nooor project is considered the biggest technology project to serve education and curricula in the kingdom.
Emad El- Dighaither, the owner of the project gave a presentation in which he indicated that Nooor project is the third and last phase of a cooperation project singed by SimaNooor and the Saudi Ministry of Education before about four years. By the end of the first phase, laser discs for all curricula and lessons of the ministry were distributed on a collection of schools in a number of educational directorates in the academic year 1427/ 1428. These discs are supported by various multimedia technologies and tools.
In the second phase of the project, during the two academic years 1428 and 1429, a greater number of educational directorates, their teachers and students were covered by the project. This by its turn paved the way for third phase of the project that would include all schools and students of the kingdom. A library containing hundreds of thousands of files and educational contents would be in every school and every home. These files and contents would be renewed and updated daily by the vast team of teachers and programmers who would be staffed in site of: www.nooor.com.
El- Dighaither stated that this site would include a huge library of educational contents, curriculum books, electronic lessons, multimedia libraries, references, electronic cyclopedias, tools and engines to initiate lessons besides the Arabic electronic content.
He highlighted that Badir Incubation of Information and Communication Technology supported the project by participating in patents registration, supplying technical consultations. Badir also boosted the site library by the content of scientific experiments performed by KACST and also by participating in researches that serve both the Arabic content and the educational content. Moreover, Badir hosted the company in its headquarter, provided means of communications, hosted the site, supplied administrative consultations, fostered launching the project and identified it to concerned parties on  both the local and international levels.
El- Dighaither stressed that the project is a continuity of the standing cooperation between Intel and Simanooor since four years. Based on the long-standing experience round the world in the field of education, it was coordinated with the company to supply the electronic educational content on Skool Arabic sites and linking them with the site to benefit from these sites within Saudi curricula.
He added that cooperation is going on to benefit from Intel experience in the technical field to modify the processing capabilities to develop the site servers to deal with the vast segment served by the site that exceeds five million student and half a million teacher. This is carried out keeping path with the objectives of the site by linking it to international sites. In this context, a tripartite agreement was lately signed between the Saudi ministry of education, Google Corporation and Simanooor to secure 6 million accounts on Google Maps for students and teacher of the ministry.
Emad El- Dighaither went on saying that Nooor site comprises all books and curricula of the ministry of education that amount to more than 400 curriculum with more than 50000 pages besides electronic lessons for the topics of the curricula that have been developed by tools and engines attached to the site to initiate lessons.
He elaborated that the media library of the site encompasses thousands of ready to use entities such as films, images, experiments, flashes, encyclopedias and other media that the site is being fed with daily. The site has been designed with interfaces and tools that develop students search skills.
Out of the extra services included in the site, there are technologies that participate in developing search systems, wiki, articles, questions systems, media libraries and forums besides other systems that have been developed to serve Saudi curricula.
The site supports systems of developing the content as the company has succeeded in supplying technologies that develop teachers’ skills through enabling them to initiate their electronic lessons and publish them on the internet without any need to programming backgrounds or knowing net-technologies or hosting the site. This system comprehends a collection of innovations whose patents are being registered at the time being as these innovations are presented for the first in the educational sector.