Introduction
There is a strong connection between education and digital technology, especially at this moment in our world’s history. The link between these two issues has multiple dimensions, all related to shaping the future and determining the extent to which we, as human societies, can take the initiative in shaping our own future.
Currently, the rapid development of digital technology is occurring at a pace that makes it increasingly difficult to control, as if it is moving independently of human will. Regaining the initiative and directing technological evolution, rather than merely trying to keep up with it, has become a necessity for the survival of humanity.
The only way to achieve this is by preparing new generations to live in a digital world driven by human will, and this can only be done through education. On the other hand, using digital technology itself is the only means to develop an education system capable of equipping new generations with the tools to control this technology.
The state of the education sector in Egypt seems to be outside the framework of this equation that the world is currently trying to address. This sector has suffered from continuous deterioration for decades, making it resistant to reform. Therefore, placing a massive responsibility on it, such as transitioning new generations into the digital world, seems difficult to achieve. However, the truth is that while digital technology creates significant challenges, it also offers solutions capable of overcoming the traditional limitations of reality.
In other words, this technology offers potential that, if correctly leveraged, can achieve what seemed impossible. Through the conscious and innovative use of digital technology, a country like Egypt can overcome decades of decline in education. Moreover, this sector can be developed to prepare future generations to face the challenges of our digital world.
This paper explores the potential of using digital technology in the Egyptian education sector to not only fix the damage caused by years of deterioration, but also to advance it to meet the digital age requirements. The paper begins with a critical analysis of the current state of digital technology use in the education sector by its key stakeholders: state institutions, the private sector, and independent educators.
The paper also reviews the opportunities and potentials that digital technology offers when used realistically and creatively in the education sector. It discusses enhancing the quality of education, improving the conditions of the educational process, and addressing the chronic issues of the Egyptian education sector. Finally, the paper explores the challenges and obstacles facing the potential use of digital technology in reforming and developing Egypt’s education sector.
Critical Reading of the Current Reality
The use of digital technology in Egypt’s education sector has grown significantly over the past decade. The applications of digital technology have encompassed the educational process’s functional and organizational aspects, albeit to varying degrees. Similarly, the impact of digital technology on improving the quality of education, enhancing its conditions, and addressing its chronic issues has varied.
This section first explores the various aspects of the current use of digital technology in Egypt’s education sector. Secondly, it evaluates this use, its impact, and its positive and negative aspects. The paper approaches this analysis by focusing on the key stakeholders who each play an independent role in the educational process: official institutions, private sector companies, and content creators who provide educational services online.
Official Institutions
The largest and most influential official institution in Egypt’s education sector is the Ministry of Education and Technical Education. The ministry sets the overall strategies for the educational process. It also directly manages public schools at the primary, secondary, and technical levels, while overseeing the operations of private schools of various types (private and international schools).
Over the past ten years, the Ministry has taken numerous steps to integrate digital technology into the educational process, both in teaching and administrative aspects. The Ministry’s efforts can be qualitatively divided into the following categories:
- Direct use in the educational process (such as the school tablet project and teaching computer science subjects).
- Providing educational and administrative services through ministry-affiliated websites and/or social media platforms.
The School Tablet Project
In 2018, the Ministry of Education began implementing the tablet project, commonly referred to in the media as the “School Tablet” project. The initiative aims to distribute tablets to secondary education students (both general and technical), integrate them into the educational process, and enable them to benefit from the digital services provided by the Ministry via the Internet.
Each student receives a tablet on loan upon entering the first year of high school and is expected to return it upon completing secondary education. Students are supposed to use their tablets to access digital textbooks provided by the ministry through its websites. They also use them to take some of their first and second-semester exams each year.
The Egyptian experience in using tablets in schools is not the first of its kind, as several countries, including Turkey and Uruguay, have preceded it. The choice of tablets is attributed to their lower cost, as well as their smaller size and weight compared to laptops or desktop computers. As a result, they are easier to transport and use in various settings, allowing students to use them both in schools and at home.
The experience of using tablets is similar to that of using smartphones. This is an advantage because most students are already familiar with smartphones, making it easier for them to use tablets without needing specialized training.
On the other hand, low-cost tablets, including those used in the Egyptian project, have limitations that affect their effectiveness for academic purposes. One major drawback is the small screen size, which makes it difficult to use multiple applications side by side. This is essential for students who need to view a source of information (such as a textbook) while taking notes simultaneously. Additionally, note-taking is further hindered by the lack of physical keyboards on tablets.
Teaching Digital Technology Curricula
The Ministry of Education introduced a subject called “Computer Science” into pre-university education long ago. Usually, teaching this subject relies on a printed textbook, while some schools provide computer labs for practical training.
However, it is noteworthy that these computer labs do not cover all public schools due to a lack of financial resources. Moreover, many of them suffer from issues that partially or entirely hinder their functionality.
At the content level, the computer science curricula provided by the ministry suffer from several limitations. The curricula are limited to an introduction to using personal computers, operating systems, and some office applications (word processing and spreadsheets). Additionally, they focus exclusively on Microsoft applications, including the Windows operating system and Office suite.
In most cases, students who already use computers daily do not gain new or useful knowledge or skills from these curricula. On the other hand, a large segment of students from low-income families, especially in rural and remote areas, receive only theoretical information that they cannot benefit from due to their lack of personal computers.
Use in Providing Educational and Administrative Services
The Egyptian Ministry of Education has established several websites that offer educational and administrative services to students, their parents, and teachers across various stages of education. Below are some of the most important services provided:
- E-Learning Platform: This platform offers educational content based on the curricula provided by the Ministry and taught in public and private schools. The content can be accessed through a search process by selecting the educational stage, academic year, semester, type of content, and subject. Although the search menu for content types includes a wide range of options, such as interactive content, supplementary materials, etc., the only type available in almost all cases is the school textbook.
- Unified Account Service: The Unified School Account for Electronic Services is a service provided by the Ministry of Education in partnership with Microsoft. This service allows students and teachers to create accounts to receive an email address for communication and access to Microsoft Office applications available online.
- Video Recorded Lessons Service: Through its official channel on YouTube, the Ministry offers video recordings of lessons in various subjects taught by teachers affiliated with the Ministry. At the time of writing this paper, this channel has over 17,000 videos and over 330,000 subscribers. This is, in fact, a relatively low rate. Additionally, the number of views on the channel’s videos is minimal, especially compared to similar content provided by teachers through their personal channels on YouTube.
- Procedures for Secondary Exams Application and University Admissions: The Ministry of Education has enabled secondary school students to complete the procedures for filling out application forms for general secondary exams through a dedicated website. Additionally, it has allowed students to submit their preferences for admission to colleges and institutes available during the university coordination stage through another website. Providing these services digitally represents a significant improvement in terms of ease and speed, saving effort and time for students and their families compared to completing the same procedures on paper.
Private Sector
The private sector in this context refers to companies that provide supplementary and parallel educational services alongside those offered by official schools. Most companies currently offering their services digitally are the same ones that have been active for decades in Egypt’s thriving and profitable supplementary textbook industry.
As an extension of this industry, which thrives on the low quality of official textbooks, these companies compete with official entities in providing educational content through digital platforms and applications. They offer the same school curricula but in a more appealing and engaging format, including supplementary textbooks that can be downloaded or accessed as PDFs, as well as recorded video lessons. Some applications also provide interactive exercises and practice tests.
The private sector’s use of digital technology in education cannot be considered a significant qualitative addition. Ultimately, what private sector companies offer is merely an extension of the services they have provided for decades, which exist primarily due to the chronic shortcomings of the official education system.
The use of digital technology facilitates profiting from these educational services by enabling access to a larger audience, especially given the high cost of printed supplementary books. On the other hand, these new digital formats retain the same drawbacks as traditional supplementary books.
These books do not enhance educational content but merely exploit the shortcomings of official textbooks. The same applies to the services offered by the private sector—neither addresses the systemic flaws in the educational process. While students benefit from easier access to services that help them pass exams, this does not mean they acquire a higher quality of education.
Content Creators
Teachers represent a significant and sizable segment of content creators in Egypt’s cyberspace. This is mainly because offering lessons in the form of online content is an extension of the private tutoring industry, which has flourished in Egypt for decades.
Providing lessons online is an easier and more profitable alternative for many teachers than traditional private tutoring. These educators primarily deliver their lessons in video format via YouTube, generating substantial revenue through high viewership rates.
Additionally, some teachers create their own platforms that offer services for a fee. Many also support their work in delivering lessons and reviews through their accounts on other platforms like TikTok, as well as discussion groups on messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
Similar to the private sector’s use of digital technology, the benefit students receive is essentially access to the same service but at a lower cost or for free. Additionally, they gain the convenience of accessing the service at any time that suits them, without the need to leave their homes.
Apart from that, the educational content provided by teacher-content creators does not offer any features that enhance the quality of education students receive. Once again, the focus of these content providers is on helping students pass exams rather than delivering any real educational value.
Opportunities and Potential
Enhancing the Quality of Education
It is crucial to recognize that the very concept of educational quality now needs to be redefined in light of the changes brought about by the rapid advancement of digital technology, particularly AI. Suppose the ultimate goal of education has always been to prepare successful, productive individuals who contribute to themselves and their societies. In that case, achieving this today requires equipping them to live and work effectively in a digital world.
Thus, one of the most critical criteria for assessing education quality today is its ability to equip learners with the skills to understand, utilize, and mitigate the negative impacts of digital technologies. These same digital technologies offer vast potential for enhancing education quality in a way that aligns with the demands of the digital age.
- Interactive Learning: Digital technologies offer significant potential for delivering educational content interactively. This can be achieved under the supervision and participation of teachers or through students engaging independently with the content. Interactive content refers to methods that encourage students to engage with the material rather than passively receiving it. The use of multimedia, gamification mechanisms, and other tools helps capture students’ attention and enhance their interaction with the educational content.
- Information Access Skills: Digital technologies provide unprecedented means for accessing information. Today, AI models serve as alternatives to traditional search engines for accessing information. This shift has significantly reduced the need to rely on human memory to store vast amounts of information. Instead, digital technologies train students in the skills needed to locate relevant information and use it to solve problems efficiently. Today, educational quality is measured by a student’s ability to ask the right questions and effectively utilize answers from digital tools, rather than memorizing predetermined responses.
- Optimal Utilization of Human Resources: Limited financial resources allow training only a few talented teachers and enhancing their skills. By utilizing the available resources to provide high-quality training to a suitable number of teachers, digital technology can help maximize the impact of these efforts. Through remote learning technologies, these well-trained teachers can reach a larger number of students, ensuring that more learners receive a higher-quality education. This approach enables a gradual expansion of teacher training over time, rather than offering insufficient training to a large number of educators who may not fully benefit from it or contribute effectively to improving educational quality.
Improving Educational Conditions
The majority of students and teachers in Egypt face unsuitable learning conditions due to various material deficiencies in the educational system. The deteriorating state of school buildings makes attending and teaching classes physically and mentally exhausting, draining energy that should be devoted to learning itself. Additionally, the severe shortage of educational facilities results in overcrowded classrooms, making the learning process difficult and, at times, nearly impossible.
The proper and innovative use of digital technology can help improve educational conditions in Egypt. This requires, first and foremost, adopting a realistic and gradual approach. Given the overcrowding and difficult conditions that both students and teachers face, it’s important to recognize that the traditional model of in-person school attendance doesn’t always achieve its intended educational and social goals.
Therefore, digital technologies should be leveraged to expand remote education services and use them innovatively to reduce classroom overcrowding. This approach could create opportunities for gradually improving school buildings and equipping them with the necessary facilities and tools for effectively integrating digital technology into classrooms in the near future.
Contributing to Addressing Chronic Issues
The education sector in Egypt suffers from several chronic issues that have persisted for decades. The primary reason behind the emergence, continuation, and worsening of these problems—as well as the state’s inability to resolve them—is the extremely low level of government spending on education. As a result, the necessary resources for the educational process have never been adequately available, leading to the deterioration of all its aspects. This decline has been further exacerbated by the significant deterioration in the competence of the human element responsible for education, as it is itself a product of the same struggling educational system.
Innovative use of digital technology can help break the vicious cycle of chronic and persistent issues in Egypt’s education sector. This paper has highlighted the potential of leveraging digital technology to enhance the quality of education and improve the conditions of the educational process. Both of these aspects are directly linked to the chronic problems facing the education sector and the government’s low expenditure on it. However, these challenges can be addressed through cost-effective technological solutions.
It is evident that this approach is the exact opposite of the Egyptian government’s current strategy for integrating digital technology into education. The government’s approach focuses on reinforcing the existing structure of the educational process by implementing high-cost digital solutions without sufficient prior planning.
Digital technology can contribute to all the necessary stages of an integrated approach to overcoming the chronic issues in Egypt’s education sector. Big data technologies can be utilized to collect and analyze essential data for developing detailed plans based on real-world conditions. Additionally, remote learning technologies can be employed to reduce the time students spend in classrooms, thereby decreasing overcrowding rates.
Furthermore, digital technology can be used within schools to enhance educational content quality and gradually provide teacher training. There is a vast space for action, limited only by the imagination of those involved. Digital technology is characterized by flexibility and multiple approaches to its use—the key is to select an approach that aligns with the Egyptian context.
In this context, the Egyptian government should reconsider its reliance on closed-source software through partnerships with major technology companies like Microsoft. While such partnerships may offer some short-term benefits, shifting toward open-source software solutions would allow for customized solutions tailored to long-term needs. This approach would also help nurture local expertise that can be relied upon in the future.
Obstacles, Challenges, and Ways to Overcome Them
Weak Infrastructure
The term “infrastructure” in this section refers to its broad meaning. When addressing a specific economic or service sector, the infrastructure for utilizing digital technology in that sector refers to the set of essential factors that enable its effective use. The education sector is unique in that it serves the entire population of a country, distributed across its entire geographic area, and over an extended period of each individual’s life. Moreover, the educational process is not confined solely to educational institutions (such as schools, institutes, and universities); rather, a fundamental part of it takes place in students’ homes.
The Internet serves as the backbone for utilizing digital technology in the education sector, meaning that Internet access is a necessary prerequisite for this usage. On the other hand, delivering digital services over the Internet imposes several requirements in terms of equipment and devices for both providing and receiving the service.
Challenges of Internet Access
Despite the Egyptian government’s continuous promotion of its achievements in digital transformation, the actual progress regarding essential digital services remains very limited. The essential infrastructure required for the practical use of digital technology remains severely inadequate.
This is clearly reflected in the capability of accessing the Internet under its various conditions, including whether network connectivity is available and the quality, continuity, and stability of this connection. The challenges of Internet access in Egypt can be summarized as follows:
Network Limitation
Internet access relies on wired (landline) and wireless (mobile) telecommunications networks. Despite the Egyptian government’s announcements of multiple projects to modernize and improve the efficiency of the country’s telecommunications network, these networks still suffer from numerous shortcomings, including:
- Lack of Full Coverage: Telecommunications services still do not consistently cover the entire geographic scope of Egypt, particularly mobile networks. This issue is especially evident in rural and remote areas.
- Continued Reliance on Copper Wiring: Despite efforts to replace these connections with fiber-optic alternatives, these upgrades remain incomplete, particularly in the last-mile connections (from the network to buildings and homes). This imposes unavoidable limits on maximum internet speeds and bandwidth capacity.
- Persistent and Recurring Technical Issues: Egypt’s telecommunications network lacks the capacity to handle current usage volume. This results in a service level that never fully meets its advertised speed and capacity. It also leads to instability and inconsistency in service quality, with frequent disruptions and fluctuations in performance.
Service Pricing and Usage Limits
The vast majority of Egyptians suffer from limited income. Additionally, Egypt has faced significant economic challenges in recent years, leading to a rapid decline in the value of the local currency. Under these circumstances, the cost of internet access becomes a crucial factor in determining citizens’ ability to obtain the service.
On the other hand, the evolution of online content has led to greater reliance on multimedia, which requires higher speeds and larger data capacities. This results in increased consumption rates, measured by the volume of data sent and received over the Internet. In Egypt, internet services face several obstacles that hinder their efficient use, which can be summarized as follows:
- High Service Costs: Egypt is among the countries with the highest internet access costs, whether through land-line or mobile networks (measured by the cost per megabit per month). These services are priced according to the maximum amount of data received during a specific period (usually one month or 28 days). The service providers, primarily the state-owned Telecom Egypt (TE), practice a participatory monopoly in which they agree on the pricing of the service, which does not allow for competition among them to offer the service at better prices. The current prices of the service (especially after a recent hike of up to 40%) are beyond the reach of the vast majority of Egyptian citizens, even for a minimum data rate.
- Usage limits: Internet service providers in Egypt stopped offering an open (unlimited data plans) service option years ago. Today, these services are offered through tiered packages with a fixed data capacity (usage limit) within a specified period. Packages with moderate or high data limits come at excessively high prices, particularly those offered via mobile networks. Moreover, service providers’ data depletion and rollover practices are extremely unfair, often forcing users to pay more for the same level of service.
- Unfair Practices: Internet service providers in Egypt widely implement speed throttling to manage network congestion, which the existing infrastructure cannot handle. This means that users experience deliberate reductions in internet speed without prior notice or warning. Moreover, these companies implement technical interventions for content filtering and other restrictions, which collectively degrade the overall quality of service.
Challenges of Providing Digital Services
- Data Centers and Servers: The number of data centers in Egypt remains limited compared to many other countries as well as local demand. Furthermore, most existing centers have restricted computing capabilities and storage capacities. As a result, delivering large-scale digital services to a vast number of users often requires outsourcing costly external services. This directly affects the performance of digital services provided by the Ministry of Education, which frequently experiences disruptions during peak usage times. Such issues are predictable for many of these services, given that many students and teachers need to access them simultaneously during educationally mandated peak periods.
- Shortage of Equipment and Devices in Schools: Providing the necessary equipment and devices for delivering digital services in schools requires significant financial resources, which Egypt’s education budget cannot fully cover. As a result, most schools in Egypt lack sufficient internet connectivity equipment to meet classroom usage demands. Additionally, most schools suffer from insufficient computers and other digital devices, both in quantity and quality, making the use of digital technology extremely difficult. Schools also face ongoing challenges related to aging equipment, inadequate upgrades, and poor maintenance. Consequently, the use of digital technology in most schools is only nominal, with practical implementation ranging from severely limited to nonexistent.
- Limited Availability of Computers in Homes: The prices of computers and electronic devices in Egypt are generally high compared to prevailing income levels. These prices have risen significantly in recent years due to the decline in the local currency’s value. The limited income of the majority of citizens prevents many students from acquiring personal laptops or desktop computers at home. This means fewer opportunities for these students to benefit from available online educational services.
- Blocking and Censorship Policies: Through its security agencies, the Egyptian government enforces extensive website blocking and censorship on the content transferred through the internet. These blocking practices often extend unjustifiably to include websites that provide educational and knowledge-based content.
Deficiencies in the Current Educational System
Most of the digital technology used in Egypt’s education sector today can largely be described as glossy paint on a crumbling wall. The reality is that Egypt’s education system has suffered from decades of continuous decline. The primary cause of this deterioration is the extremely low level of public spending on this vital sector. However, various social and cultural factors have also negatively impacted the quality of education in Egypt.
The education sector has a unique characteristic: it produces its own human resources. This means that the deterioration of the educational process directly results in poorer outcomes, including the quality of new teachers entering the system each year.
The deterioration of the educational process coincides with declining cognitive levels and diminishing skills among the teachers it produces, which in turn contributes to the further degradation of the education system. Moreover, the poor caliber of education sector personnel – both teaching and administrative staff – presents an exceptionally formidable obstacle to any development efforts within this sector.
The confusion surrounding the use of digital technology policies in Egypt’s education sector is a symptom of the lack of a clear vision of what the state seeks to achieve through the education system. This lack of vision also extends to the use of digital technology. There is no clear vision of what the state seeks to achieve through using digital technology in the education sector. Consequently, there is no clear assessment of the requirements for achieving this vision, nor are there plans for its implementation based on specific priorities and a realistic timeframe.
This results in the pursuit of ambitious projects that exceed available resources, ultimately leading to failure in achieving their objectives. At the same time, this approach diverts the already limited funding away from essential projects necessary to provide the material and human resources required for using digital technology. In particular, insufficient funding is allocated to equipping schools with the necessary devices and tools or training teachers on effectively integrating digital technology into education.
In addition to unrealistic spending priorities, another major flaw in the state’s approach to education is its heavy reliance on partnerships with major technology companies, such as Microsoft for software and Samsung for hardware and equipment. This approach supports these companies’ monopolization of the Egyptian market, which leads to the high cost of the digital services that the state is trying to provide. It also leads to a lack of flexibility in these services while relying on closed technologies and software.
To enter the digital world properly, the Egyptian education system needs to review and reassess the entire process. A well-structured strategy should be developed to reform the system entirely within a realistic timeframe, ensuring maximum benefits from digital technology use. This requires several key steps, including:
- Developing a clear vision for the future of the education sector in Egypt, with digital technology at its core.
- Revising curricula to align with the needs of the digital world, both present and future. These curricula should fully leverage digital technology and be consistent with the requirements of this technology, ensuring the best possible outcomes.
- Leveraging the potential of digital technology itself for training teachers and administrators at a pace that enhances their skills and efficiency. This ensures they can adapt to the revised curricula and use digital tools as effectively as possible.
- Shifting toward local manufacturing of devices and equipment, as well as adopting open-source software.
Conclusion
The use of digital technology in reforming and developing Egypt’s education sector can accomplish what may seem impossible today—this is the core hypothesis presented in this paper. To achieve this, there must be a genuine will to address education challenges and the use of digital technology, both realistically and creatively.
This paper has examined the use of digital technology in Egypt’s education sector through a critical and realistic analysis of its current applications. It has also explored the potential of digital technology to address the sector’s longstanding challenges. Finally, the paper discusses the obstacles and limitations imposed by current reality and how digital technology can be leveraged to develop solutions that help overcome them.