Syria

World Links recently completed a January 2004 feasibility mission to Syria to collect background information on the state's use of ICTs in secondary schools and to plan for the implementation of the program later this year.
The results of this feasibility trip, which was facilitated by FIRDOS, were highly encouraging. Simply put, the time is right to bring World Links to Syria. The two basic prerequisites for the introduction of the program -- a basic technical infrastructure (computers, Internet connectivity) in a sufficient number of schools and an emerging group of teachers and teacher trainers familiar with basic uses of computers for teaching -- are in place, and World Links provides a natural complement and follow-up to existing computer literacy courses.

In addition, the government is embarking on an ambitious program to equip hundreds of additional schools with computer labs in the next year, which means the potential "multiplier effect" of the program is very high, as the lessons learned and models developed in the first year of the program could be tested, modified where necessary and then replicated in many additional schools in subsequent years.

Approximately 100 Syrian secondary schools have been equipped with networked computer labs, and the Ministry of Education is in the process of supplying them with Internet connectivity. The first group of participants in the program will be drawn from teachers at these schools. It is expected that the lessons learned from this initial group of teachers and teacher trainers will provide valuable guidance for the Ministry going forward, as many more Syrian schools come "on-line" in the next few years and thousands of teachers require training to effectively capitalize on the large investments by the country in computer and Internet infrastructures for education.