Taking place Tuesday 25th May, 10:15 GST / UAE, 09:15 AST / Saudi Arabia, as part of the Victorian EdTech Summit, the session will feature leaders from Ministries in the GCC region who will give their vision on the importance of digital transformation and how technology has and will continue to impact the education sector.
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Meet the speakers for this panel discussion:
Chairperson: Faisal Ali Al Balushi – Chairman of the Omani Society for Education Technology
Faisal Al Balushi is a Chairman of an EdTech nonprofit organization and he believes in harnessing the power of technology to make positive change and transform people’s lives. His vision is to inspire educational leaders, policymakers, organizations and individuals to efficiently use, utilize and integrate technology to improve the quality of education and so improve quality of life for all.
As an EdTech advocate, Faisal studies the effect of new emerging technologies on education in particular and society in general.
With 17 years of expertise in education technology, he has worked with Ministries, private organizations, community leaders and international partners to facilitate the digital transformation in teaching and learning, encourage innovation in classroom and promote equity and equality in education.
Faisal leads a cross-functional team to support the educational community in Oman including educational institutions, teachers, students and parents. He works with his team to introduce and manage national wide projects and initiatives to attain Oman’s 2040 vision and UN’s sustainable development Goal 4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all).
To list some of the endeavors, Faisal and his team successfully provided online training opportunities for over 27,000 learners on future digital skills. They also helped schools and universities to effectively deploy online learning platforms, build open educational content repository and apply AI based technologies to protect school students from cybercrimes.
To overcome the shortage of adequate Arabic training content in technology field, Faisal led a project with his team to launch one of the largest Arabic online training platforms in Middle East (www.nadrus.com).
Apart from working in the education marketplace, Faisal is presently cooperating with leading international technology businesses to scale technology literacy to untapped markets across the Middle East. In his spare time, Faisal loves to invest in young talents, exceptional teachers, emerging EdTech leaders and startups by providing one-to-one mentoring and coaching.
HE Dr. Abdullatif Abdullatif - General Supervisor of Digital Transformation and Information Security at the Ministry of Education, Saudi Arabia
Dr Abdullatif Mohammad Alabdullatif is currently an advisor and General Supervisor of Digital Transformation and Information Security in ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia. He is handling the digital transformation file for education. Before that he was the owner of the National digital transformation strategy (Raqmi) file for the whole kingdom in the National Digital Transformation Unit where he was the VP there. Abdullatif started his experience in digitalization and digital transformation in the educational sector, he was heading the effort for Digital transformation for one of the oldest and biggest universities in the kingdom
HE Dr. Hamad Al Yahyaei - Assistant Undersecretary for the Curriculum & Evaluation Sector at the Ministry of Education, UAE
His Excellency Dr. Hamad Muhammad Al Yahyaei, Assistant Undersecretary for Curricula Sector at the Ministry of Education since December 2017, United Arab Emirates. Dr. Al Yahyaei has worked as a curriculum director at the Ministry between 2015 and 2017 and was an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at the United Arab Emirates University.
Laila Al Hadhrami - Senior Executive Digital Transformation at the Ministry of Transport, Communication & Information Technology, Oman
Laila Al Hadhrami, senior executive-Digital Transformation in the eTransformation team in Ministry of Transport, communications and IT, as she is also the director of Building Capacity and Awareness in Smart City Platform. She started working as a professional in this field from 2005 and has experience as well as credentials in different relevant fields including Government Innovation, Change Management, UX, Re-process engineering, Business Analysis, Project Management, and Knowledge Management. Speaking about Knowledge Management, she is very passionate about CoPs and she has established the first CoP in Change Management in Oman.
Laila has also participated as a speaker in many conferences and seminars in Oman and overseas. Currently, she is leading national projects in Oman, like Government Innovation in emerging technologies in Oman, and other projects related to digital transformation. She is also the founder of Smart City Ambassadors initiative that has been awarded by ITU Innovation Challenges Winning ideas from the Ecosystem best practice challenge category 2020.
Currently, Laila is Leading change management activities on the digital transformation program and support the government entities to adapt the required changes to meet their digital transformation objectives and organization culture change towards the digitization.
Click here to view the full conference programme for the event.
