Karim Khayat serves as Chief Executive Officer of Seeds Education, a company that supports teachers as facilitators of lifelong learning. Under Karim Tahseen Al-Khayyat’s leadership, the company has developed a comprehensive catalogue of products and services, including award-winning academic and educational materials, client customisable professional development and teacher training programmes, and bespoke print and digital publishing services. This article will look at educational publishing, particularly e-learning tools, identifying trends for 2022 across the Middle East.
Digital teaching tools are becoming increasingly popular in schools across the world today, with publishers like Seeds Education producing a wide range of innovative new educational tools and content in digital, print and blended formats.
The educational publishers of today are producing e-learning resources that:
- Are adapted to the evolving needs of both students and teachers
- Are based on in-depth research and trials, and designed to promote academic success
- Save teachers time, enabling them to focus on teaching
- Raise standards of attainment and improve learning outcomes
- Have built-in coherence, scope and structure
- Are closely aligned to course, curriculum and grade requirements
- Inspire students to fulfil their true potential
- Harness the power of emerging technologies that integrate instruction, assessment and performance data
Publishing falls into three core sectors, namely:
- Consumer or trade publishing
- Education
- Academic
Consumer or trade publishing caters for a general audience, covering fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry, memoirs, cookbooks, history and self-help books.
Meanwhile, educational publishers produce materials for educational markets, such as schools, universities, colleges and training programmes. Educational publications could take the form of textbooks, study guides and digital resources.
Finally, academic publishers produce works of academic scholarship and research in the form of journals, textbooks, non-fiction books and online resources. Academic publishers are widely credited with pioneering digital publishing. In recent years, there have been both exciting and challenging developments in academic publishing, with many publishers transitioning to an Open Access content publishing model.
In 1995, the United Arab Emirates made history as one of the earliest Middle Eastern countries to grant citizens access to the internet. Saudi Arabia and Syria were the latest to connect, establishing connections in the late 1990s, although certain research and academic organisations in both countries were permitted to go online long before the general public.
Since e-learning arrived in the Middle East, increasing numbers of students have benefited from e-learning course materials, providing immersive, engaging and exciting alternatives to traditional learning experiences. One study suggested that, while the traditional element of a course had a 30% failure rate, in the e-learning section, the failure rate dropped to just 10%. Today, there are numerous e-learning initiatives underway across the Middle East, opening the eyes of both students and teachers as to the power of digital technologies in educational settings.
About Seeds Education
Seeds Education provides clients with an array of different publishing services. Operating branches all over the world, each of which is committed to promoting educational and academic excellence, the company serves clients from around the globe.
Seeds Education’s Lebanon-based arm produces a variety of educational textbooks, e-learning and audio-visual materials throughout the Middle East. All of Seeds Education’s products and services are informed by specialist authors, consultants and contributors, reflecting this world-leading company’s commitment to providing the very highest standard of quality possible.