The Al-Bedaya Project

Three Zayed University students put together a self learning program that has been piloted in Kenya. http://al-bedaya.org/

Al Bedaya is a graduation project created by three Emirati students, Arwa Al-Mazrooei, Fatima Al-Sayegh, and Khadija Al-Abbas, from the College of Communication and Media Sciences (CCMS) at Zayed University, Dubai.

The name, "Al Bedaya", literally means "The Beginning" in English, and it aims to promote social media as a form of self education. As university students about to graduate, we have come to realize and acknowledge that the "real" education happened outside the classroom, when we, the students, made an effort to seek information on our own accord without the need for supervision. The social media tools such as Wikipedia, podcasts, and bookmarking that we used only developed our education and gave us different insights and perceptions with input from across the globe. The whole purpose of "Al Bedaya" is to usher in a new beginning, as the name suggests, in the manner in which we educate our youth. Promoting self-education in Kenya is what we hope to accomplish, and we'll do that by teaching them the methods, but this entire experience is just as much as a lesson to us as it is to them. We are not replacing school education, but rather complimenting it with the use of social media.

This project was supported by the Al Maktoum Foundation. http://www.mbrfoundation.ae/ENGLISH/Pages/default.aspx