EdX, Jordanian Queen Partner To Unveil Edraak

Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan unveiled Edraak, an online education website for the Arabic-speaking world, during a visit to Harvard on Thursday.

A collaboration with edX, the virtual education platform founded jointly by Harvard and MIT, the new initiative will be the first massive open online course platform in the Middle East.

The new program will be under the supervision of the Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development. In addition to developing new courses taught by top Arab professionals, Edraak aims to increase the accessibility of online courses by translating existing edX courses into Arabic.

Al Abdullah said in a press release that Edraak will help educators reach the growing group of “intellectually hungry Arab youth.”

MIT professor and edX president Anant Agarwal said in a press release that edX is honored to join Al Abdullah in bringing the online learning experience to the Arab world.

“EdX was founded on the belief that education should be freely available for everyone, like the air we breathe,” Agarwal said in the press release. “We share Her Majesty Queen Rania’s vision to bring opportunity to those who need it most through education.”

EdX, founded in 2012 when Harvard and MIT pledged to spend $30 million each to develop a new virtual education initiative, has since grown to include over two dozen other institutions of higher learning.

This May, the edX network expanded into Asia for the first time through partnerships with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean universities, expanding the edX network to four continents and more than doubling the number of participating schools. Edraak marks edX’s first partnership in the Middle East.

According to Sami M. Alkyam, an Arabic preceptor at Harvard, Edraak is particularly important for the development of the Middle East.

“A project like this is the most needed in the Arab world and by Arab youths...amidst their crisis of dictatorial and post-dictatorial Arab States,” he said.

Alkyam said that problems in the Middle East require “ambitious risk-taking, effective partnerships, and the most efficient use of sources of knowledge,” all of which he said he believes Edraak will cultivate.