State of e-Learning and EdTech in Saudi Arabia
When the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted education around the world in early 2020, many instructors quickly switched to remote learning without obtaining the necessary skills, knowledge, or resources. For many higher education learners, this resulted in excellent learning experiences.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia smoothly moved its k-12 education programs and services online to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In order to give quality online learning, the kingdom conducted development research to understand the state of online K-12 education during the fall 2020 semester and set a vision for the post-covid environment. The goal was to discover areas of excellence that might be emphasised against an evaluation framework for quality online learning and improvement.
With this research, higher education programs within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia focused on the overall student learning experience.
Due to expertise and vast knowledge, the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) was invited to lead this project with the support of other partners from all across the globe.
This included UNESCO IITE, International Council for Open and Distance Education, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Distance Education and Technological Advancement (DETA), and Quality Matters to take their inputs for the success of digital education.
Saudi Arabia’s e-learning market is supported by the government to reduce the education gap. When the whole world was suffering from the pandemic, the government of Saudi Arabia encouraged universities to suspend the traditional face-to-face classes and shift to remote learning to continue the education process during the global health crisis and promote quality learning.
Aside from that, several institutions are putting efforts to have a favorable impact on the market. For example, Microsoft Corporation has teamed up with partners such as COMM-IT, Sahara Net, C-Telecoms, and Al-Mayssan Technical Services to offer free half-day training to academic institutions in Saudi Arabia with its “Teams” technology.
Top Performing EdTech Startups in Saudi Arabia and their Digital Marketing Strategies
There are approximately 70 top education companies in Saudi Arabia, including SABIS Educational Services, Dars, Wall Street English, King Abdullah University, Ostaz, Interserve Learning and Employment, Quality Education Company (QEC), and more. Similarly, there are 84 EdTech startups in Saudi Arabia.
Here is the list of best and high-performing companies that promotes digital learning in Saudi Arabia, including Riyadh and Jeddah.
1. Noon Academy
Noon Academy is one of the fastest-growing e-learning startups in the Middle East, with approximately 16 million students worldwide and over 100k teachers across 8 countries from India, Pakistan, Egypt, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq to Saudi Arabia.
It allows scholars to learn from peers and engage them in a social learning platform to make the learning interactive and more joyful.
Noon’s unique social learning platform leverages a ‘freemium’ revenue model to offer tutoring and free educational content to users who want to gain access to basic content. However, the company also has live interactive tutoring sessions with proficient and experienced tutors but charges from users before providing knowledge on advanced topics.
Noon Academy aims to help students pass their achievement tests and the Saudi general aptitude test.
Apart from its competitors, this academy is recognized by the Saudi National Center of Assessment (QIYAS). Recently, it started serving students in Egypt, a key market for the platform in the Arab region.
Noon Academy was Established in 2013 by Mohammed Aldhalaan, the CEO and co-founder of the educational technology (edTech) startup, and started as a test preparation website.
Today, it has become the fastest-growing digital education-based startup in the kingdom. And, it has gained popularity worldwide through its comprehensive online learning platform that has over 6 million registered students.
The platform includes gamification features and social components to help students participate in contests, peer-to-peer learning programs so that they can have a collaborative learning experience with their peers and teachers.
As of June last year, Noon had raised a Pre-B fund of $13 million. It now has the vision to bring 50 million students on its platform with tutors from around the globe by 2023. It is also going to open a new hub in London where teams will be based on product, design, and data science.
Company Highlights:
- Founded Year: 2013
- Investors: Saudi Venture Capital Company, Abdulrahman Aljadhai, Raed Ventures, and 6 Other Investors [Investor Details]
- Company Size: 51-200 employees
- Technology: The social learning platform Noon utilizes 17 technology products and services, including Google Analytics, HTML5, and Google Fonts, according to the research of G2 Stack. Also, the company is using 4 technologies for its website, according to Builtwith. These include Google Tag Manager, Google Font API, and Google Analytics
- Specialties: Online social learning, gamification, education, adaptive learning, personalized learning, test prep programs, and IT
- Website: https://www.learnatnoon.com/
About Noon Academy (Student Learning App)
Noon Academy is a digital learning app that students can download for free from the Google Play Store, App Store, and its website to attend live classes and find teachers with ease.
Noon is an e-learning app. With their app, you can enroll yourself in an interactive classroom and learn with people you like – your teachers and friends – using practice questions, fun quizzes, informative learning material, and so on.
Features of Noon Academy – Student Learning App
World’s best teachers:
Noon has professional teachers from across the world and even from its own school to help students acquire online learning and solve their problems.
Interactive groups:
During online classes, the app supports you in joining your friends into groups, passing your tests, and providing better learning experiences.
Live chat:
The interactive and e-learning classroom app contains a live chat option to help you clear your doubts with teachers and attend live classes with your friends.
Provides tools and assistance to teachers:
Noon provides online assistants and tools to teachers and offers an online study app with access to high-quality videos, video streams online, and classrooms to enhance the online teaching experience.
One app for all grades:
Build a common digital education and e-learning platform for primary schools, secondary and high schools so that students can gather at one platform to take tutions from home and learn online.
Real-time communication:
The noon app helps students communicate and collaborate with professional teachers in real-time and allows them to learn, clear their post doubts, and write answers to their friend’s questions.
Video-based interaction:
Noon’s digital education app has an interactive classroom for teachers and helps them explain their videos in high-quality. Also, students can choose different daily exercises and courses to learn online with teachers.
Overall, the application is designed with a student-centric approach to boost and re-imagine the learning experience.
2. Acadox
Acadox is a cloud-based LMS (learning management system) for students and empowers learning through technology.
The vision of Acadox is to become a leading global provider of modern and innovative learning management technologies that satisfy the unique needs of students, trainers, learning stakeholders, and teachers.
This cloud-based learning management system is the same as the Noon app and works in the freemium model. It helps students and faculty members to sign up and utilize the basic version of the platform for free.
In the premium version, college admins must pay for extra features such as intelligence, reporting, registration, control, and others.
Company Highlights:
- Founded Year: 2010
- Investors: Iris Capital STC Ventures [Financial Details]
- Location: Jeddah (Saudi Arabia)
- Company Size: 11-50 employees
- Focuses on the MENA region and offers an Arabized interface of the platform.
- Investor: Kaust Innovation Fund
- Technologies: Actively utilizing 27 technologies for its website, and these include iPhone/Mobile Compatible, Viewport Meta, and SPF
- Markets covered: Higher Education, K-12 Schools, Corporate Training, and Training Institutes.
- Website: http://www.acadox.com/
How Acadox is Redefining and Transforming the Traditional LMS (learning management system)
After understanding the unique needs of learning and teaching, Acadox ensures that the people will get the solution that goes far beyond the functionality.
It also delivers innovative advancements to improve the student’s overall learning experience and includes a social-friendly interface in its learning management system to help learners engage and collaborate with teachers at a higher level.
Students Benefits:
- It acts as a gateway/portal to gain more knowledge resources
- Supports informal learning and helps students keep track of their progress and achievements.
- It makes students familiar with their academic priorities and sends alerts or reminders.
Faculty Benefits:
- It provides a social interface to save time and effort.
- It gives dynamic class experience and helps faculty members conduct in-depth research/analysis to know about student learning habits.
- It removes the communication and collaboration gap with the rest of the world.
Admin Benefits:
- Ensures hassle-free management of students and courses
- It lowers the cost of IT operations and maintenance
- It helps admins store all content safely in the cloud.
3. Wade7
Wade7 is another top-performing EdTech company that promotes digital learning in Saudi Arabia.
It provides web-based online courses for maths and has diligent online tutors to support weak students. The lessons are designed as bit-sized videos and may contain some tests/assessments in between the videos to help scholars understand the concept whatever they’ve taught.
Furthermore, Wade7 has partnered with Aramco, Flat 6 Labs, and more.
Company Highlights:
- Founded Year: 2013
- Company Size: 11-50 employees
- Location: Jeddah, Makkah (Saudi Arabia)
- Investor: Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures [Financial Details]
- Technologies: Actively using 16 technologies for its website, including Domain Not Resolving, WordPress, and Google Maps.
- Website: https://wade7.com/
Their Approach
Usually, in a math lesson, students first make themselves familiar with a mathematical concept to solve abstract problems, which don’t make any sense to them.
On the other hand, the web-based courses of Wade7 are based on stories, which means the company re-writes math lessons in the story form and tries to create some emotions in the real-world application so that students can learn faster and understand the math easier.
After re-writing math lessons to stories, they produce animated videos that are not more than 3 minutes long and help learners get a lot of practice exercises to improve their math skills and ensure that they will understand the lesson while solving basic to complex math questions/problems.
Benefits
Students from Saudi can access a wide variety of math lessons or courses anytime and anywhere. They can even attend private sessions at the cost-effective price range to make their learning fun and easy.
How Wade7 Makes the Difference in the Digital Era
- Use a professional camera and expensive microphone to record all the lessons in a studio and explain them user-friendly.
- Create short videos to solve all the book examples
- Allow teachers to take on-site queries of students and let them answer their questions.
- Take tests to make sure students have clarity of each lesson.
Predictions for EdTech and eLearning in Saudi Arabia for 2022
The content services market is projected to increase with a CAGR of 18.9%, and the technology services market will grow with a CAGR of 23.9% during the projected timeline 2020-2025F.
Consequently, we can expect a large number of global content and technology businesses to enter the Saudi Arabia e-learning market in the coming years.
Owing to the massive population growth and the lack of teachers in both quality and quantity, Saudi Arabia is planning to drive e-learning growth and encourage local and global companies to promote more and more digital education services. The country also supports women for home learning, especially those who can’t attend the physical classrooms due to family obligations and limitations.
Increasing Adoption of Technologies
There will be more technologies adopted to expand the trend of digital education in Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s institutions and universities are promising to stay up to date in the market.
These universities and institutions can choose advanced technology services to enhance the quality of learning material and boost the revenue of e-learning industries in the future.
Similarly, they can consider smart classrooms and integrated LMS (Learning Management System) to succeed in e-learning businesses.
Over the last few years, it has been vital to integrate systems across institutions and corporations to assess employee and student performance. This trend is expected to follow in the future.
Recap
If you are planning to get started with the EdTech business, these are the top three and high-performing companies that you can follow to know who they are and what they are offering.
Also, you should know their strength and weaknesses as it can help you create personalized marketing strategies and let your product and service stand out in the competition.
But, if you want to succeed in the digital learning business and outrank your competitors, you must have a roadmap for your mobile application and awareness of how eLearning is impacting Saudi Arabia.
Are you ready to build a mobile app for your EdTech firm? If yes, talk to our experts at Alareeb ICT today.
At Alareeb ICT, we have more than a decade of experience in the IT organization, located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with a mission to assist government organizations and companies with a variety of digital transformation services and IT offerings.
We have been serving our comprehensive and digital services to various industries from finance, telecom, petrochemical, FMCG, and car dealers.
We have even worked with small to large EdTech companies in the GCC area.
Moreover, people from the GCC area rely on our digital transformation services; now it’s your turn. We ensure to build an application with a robust mobile application strategy that will surely take your business to the next level.
For more information, click on the link below to schedule a call with one of our experts.
