We were honored to host Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan at the edX offices in Cambridge, MA tonight to celebrate her foundation’s creation of a new Arabic-language MOOC portal, Edraak, built on the Open edX platform. Her Majesty witnessed the signing of the agreement by edx and Queen Rania Foundation CEO Haifa Dia Al-Attia. It is remarkable to see Her Majesty’s commitment to expanding educational access by bringing the educational power of MOOCs to the Arab world.
We were honored to host Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan at the edX offices in Cambridge, MA tonight to celebrate her foundation’s creation of a new Arabic-language MOOC portal, Edraak, built on the Open edX platform. Her Majesty witnessed the signing of the agreement by edx and Queen Rania Foundation CEO Haifa Dia Al-Attia. It is remarkable to see Her Majesty’s commitment to expanding educational access by bringing the educational power of MOOCs to the Arab world.
This new Arab language MOOC portal will offer Arabic translations of select courses from our 29 xConsortium partners to Arabic-speaking learners at no cost to the learners. These courses will continue to be available for free to our worldwide community of learners on edx.org. In addition, Edraak will develop its own courses in Arabic taught by leading Arab faculty members and well-known professionals in a variety of fields.
Her Majesty expressed her belief that “Edraak will open up a world of possibility for intellectually hungry Arab youth.” We wholly share Her Majesty’s vision that education should be available to anyone with a desire to learn. We are excited to partner with Queen Rania Foundation in this new initiative and look forward to enabling access to quality education to empower Arabic-speaking learners of all ages, genders and backgrounds to create a better future throughout the Arab world.
The creation of Edraak follows other significant adoptions of the Open edX platform. We were honored when Tsinghua University and a consortium of Chinese universities partnered with us to develop XuetangX, – the first MOOC portal of its kind in China – as well as when the French Ministry of Higher Education chose Open edX to power its online university initiative. These new partners, along with several other collaborators including UC Berkeley, Google, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and U Queensland, are helping us to rapidly evolve the Open edX platform to deliver quality online learning to students around the world.
It is exciting to be part of a movement that is helping to change the world.
By Anant Agarwal, edX, CEO
