Your Name and Title: Jamila Bargach, Director
School or Organization Name: Dar Si Hmad for Development, Education and Culture
Co-Presenter Name(s): Renda Nazzal, Maroune Smaili
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Agadir, Morocco
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Community leaders and educators aiming to develop ICT-based curriculum in low-resource regions
Short Session Description (one line): E-learning Challenges in a Multilingual and Rural Environment: the Case of Southwest Morocco
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
This session addresses the challenges we are facing as we develop an e-learning and information and communication technology (ICT)-based education platform for the first generation of young Berber girls to get an education and live in dorms in the rural region of southwest Morocco. The region is home to a diverse array of languages and dialects including the region's mother-tongue of Berber dialect, as well as Colloquial Moroccan Arabic, and French (as the teaching medium). The current generation of young girls are the first in their families to go to school; most, if not all, of their mothers are illiterate and innumerate.The young girls in this region have limited access to information, lack up-to-date scientific data, operate in a multilingual environment, and are extremely poor. The current educational infrastructure and learning patterns in the villages are not capable of accommodating the fast pace of informational data and technology. Thus, we are developing an interactive e-learning platform that consists of connecting the female students and instructors via ICT hardware such as mobile phones, tablets, laptops and software and services such as text messaging, online learning platforms, social media and multimedia. We aim to equip the girls with skills that can improve their academic performance, enhance their motivation, and better prepare them for future studies and work outside of their villages.Challenges of our project include proper implementation and sustainability of technology hardware and software in an extremely low-resource region, providing a simple and easy-to-learn curriculum for the students, ensuring student accessibility to the materials and motivating the teaching body, including administrators, to believe in the potential of such a project.
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