What the competition involved
The ITU received 467 submissions for the 2017 WSIS Prizes, of which 345 were nominated after expert review. From 30 March to 30 April, 1.1 million votes were cast by the WSIS stakeholder community, narrowing the field to 90 Champions across 18 categories. From those 90, one Winner was named in each category.
The Arab region accounted for 66 of the nominated projects. This one won Category 9, E-learning.
Kuwait TV broadcast the awardNews coverage of the WSIS Prizes 2017 ceremony · opens on YouTubeThe system
A learning management system with virtual classroom functionality built in, rather than bolted on. Students joined live lectures with real-time HD audio and video, watched the shared whiteboard as it was written, and interacted with the lecturer and each other through voice, chat and screen sharing. Recorded lectures from previous terms were available on demand, classified and tagged by course and date.
- Single sign-on — students authenticated once to the LMS and entered the virtual classroom without re-entering credentials, through an API integration with GoToTraining.
- Attendance tracking — the integration recorded when a student joined a session and how long they stayed, replacing a manual process entirely.
- Course materials — slides, PDFs, lecture annotations and whiteboard captures shared as OneNote notebooks synced through OneDrive, so updates propagated instantly.
- Self-assessment — electronic exams generated at random from lecturer-defined test banks, letting students measure comprehension and letting the lecturer see where the gaps were.
- Mobile — a responsive site plus native iOS and Android access to the virtual classroom.
Two constraints, solved the same way
Running real-time HD video conferencing in-house needs high-end servers, serious bandwidth and dedicated staff to keep it reliable. Storing and streaming a growing archive of recorded lectures needs the same again. Both were solved by not owning the infrastructure: the live classroom ran on a cloud SaaS service, and video archives were held in unlisted YouTube playlists integrated into the system — private to enrolled students, but served over an infrastructure that never buckles when a hundred of them open the same lecture the night before an exam.
That decision — use the cloud rather than build the rack — is the same argument our founder later made to the Ministry of Education at national scale, and it is why the ministry called on him when the schools closed in 2020.
The honest difficulties
The submission to the ITU named them plainly: bandwidth demands for HD content, uneven IT literacy among students, and a subtler one worth repeating. Teaching synchronously online pushes the lecturer towards one-to-one interaction where a physical lecture hall allows one-to-many. It works better for the student and costs the lecturer considerably more time.
The official record
The project is documented in the ITU’s official publication WSIS Stocktaking: Success Stories 2017 (ISBN 978-92-61-24211-4) — read the publication (PDF), or see the document record on itu.int.
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