On Saturday, UAE’s education minister, Hussain Al-Hammadi, along with Edward Zhou, Vice President for Global Public Affairs of Huawei, convened a panel discussion on the topic ‘Pushing the limits in the healthcare, telecoms and education sectors: bent, but not broken?’. The key aim of the virtual meeting was to discuss how the global pandemic impacted education and telecoms sectors the most.

The highly contagious coronavirus compelled everyone to remain in their house in order to keep themselves safe. But this bane indirectly turned into boon as it pushed companies and authorities for massive adoption of advanced technologies in the healthcare, education and telecommunications sectors. The minister sharing UAE’s struggling with the pandemic said that the Arab nation was well prepared to make the shift to distance learning platforms. He added that the core credit for it should go to Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Initiative which was launched in 2012. It introduced the concept of ‘Smart Classes’ to students, who now studied using smart devices and high-speed 4G networks.

"We really invested a lot a long time ago in all these infrastructure requirements to enable us to continue educating in different scenarios," he said. "It’s about building the best learning platform that is really smart, resilient, and meets modern requirements. Then you need to provide teachers and students with appropriate devices that enable them to enter the network and have the capabilities to use advanced applications and software to be embedded in the learning platform."

Al-Hammadi highlighted that despite all the preparedness the technological advancements in distance learning had its own challenges. In order to resolve the most frequently encountered ones, especially related to the increasing connection issues, the Ministry of Education established a Satellite Operations Center. He said, "We had 1.2 plus million students in the general education that we have to shift within two weeks to this platform for full 100% learning and we had never done this big a number through distance learning. We had to upgrade Internet speed by almost 100%.”

The UAE’s minister held discussions for the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit, which was a joint initiative by the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). About 100 world leaders from the global public and private sector came forward to participate in the virtual event, which was to held in separate session, in total more than 20 sessions. The main motive of the initiative was to discuss pathways to increase the role of fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies to build more resilient economies in a post-pandemic world.

WAM