"Public and private partnerships have become a huge success in driving education initiatives forward, particularly when it comes to bringing global best practices and advanced communication services to education systems," said Joseph Mehawej, Middle East Marketing Manager at Nortel.
"EEI is a truly innovative scheme to empower ongoing education reforms in Egypt through public and private partnerships. Nortel's technology provides the ideal infrastructure to build e-learning capabilities on."
Nortel's donated a highly advanced Multimedia Communication Server (MCS) 5100, aiming to help improving communications services for university and pre-university education organizations in Egypt including the provision of web collaboration, instant messaging, secure chat rooms, conferencing, application sharing and information exchange.
The vision for the GEI was conceived during the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting 2003 and is now recognized as one of the world's largest successful working models of collaborative public and private sector partnership in the area of education development.
Egypt is the most populous Arab country with 39,000 schools, 40 higher education institutions and 16 million students. The EEI brings together a variety of public and private organizations including the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of CIT and makes use of a wide range of methodologies, best practices and actionable frameworks from the GEI on how business, government, and the development communities can initiate and create sustainable public and private partnership.
Specifically, Nortel expects its contribution to help introduce e-learning into Egyptian universities, to enable collaboration and decision making support systems for institutions and enable teacher-student or professor-student web conferencing and multimedia collaboration. The system will also provide teacher and administrative staff e-training, best practice sharing, development of online learning solutions and 'peer-learning' through digital communities of teachers.
Nortel's MCS 5100 delivers multimedia and collaborative applications to enterprises. Using industry-standard protocols, it enables businesses to augment existing voice and data infrastructures with advanced IP-based capabilities, such as multimedia (video conferencing and calling, picture caller ID); collaboration (conferencing, white boarding, file exchange, co-Web browsing); personalisation (call screening, call logs, call management and routing - find me, follow me); presence and instant messaging. For higher and pre-university education users it enables e-learning delivery, connections with study groups, increased student-faculty collaboration, conferencing and other multimedia services provided to the desktop.
Education customers worldwide have implemented communications solutions from Nortel, including Dubai Men's College (UAE), the University of Connecticut (USA), the University of Texas at Austin (USA), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Seoul (Korea) National University, the University of Ulster (Ireland), Saga University (USA), George Mason University (USA), the University of Granada (Spain), Bosphorus University (Turkey), Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), and the Philadelphia Unified School System (USA).
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Posted by Anne-Birte Stensgaard, Senior News Editor
