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The Role of New Technologies in Advancing Education and Learning
Professor Alain Senteni, Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University
Professor Alain Senteni’s bio
Professor Alain Senteni is currently the Dean of the School of e-Education (SEED) of Hamdan Bin
Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) in Dubai (UAE). Previously, he was the first appointed Di-
rector of the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies (VCILT) and the Chairman of the
Lifelong Learning Cluster (LLC) at the University of Mauritius where he led the establishment, de-
velopment, and operation of these new R&D centers from 2001 to 2008. Professor Senteni received
an Engineering Degree in Computer Science (1969), that was followed by a PhD (1989), and an habil-
itation to supervise research in Artificial Intelligence in Education (HDR, 1995) from the National
Polytechnics Institute (INPT) in Toulouse (France). Alain Senteni started his academic career in Can-
ada as a professor of Educational Technologies at the Faculty of Education, University of Montreal
from 1989 to 1996. Professor Senteni interests in technology-enhanced education started in the nine-
teen seventies at the early stages of the Logo community in Canada. His current work and research
regard the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into educational sys-
tems of developing countries. In September 2011, Professor Senteni was awarded an Honorary Doc-
torate in Education from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada, for his contribution to international
development and online education in developing countries
Abstract
In this paper, we will try to answer a few questions about the educational challenges that can be
solved with technology. We will also clarify the issues at stake for learning in a knowledge society,
assuming that, if there is no magic educational medium (and never will be), there exist nowadays
powerful technologies, flexible modes of delivery, smart integration strategies, and effective policies
allowing increase access to quality education. Technologies are not magic wands, they can only con-
tribute to disseminate, scale up, reify and accelerate human intentions, whatever these are. They serve
the behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist approaches equally well, and they can be conducive to
individualistic confinement, as well as to more open and cooperative forms of teaching. The nature
and quality of the result will depend on the epistemological orientations to structure the usage of tech-
nology. Contemporary pedagogy refers not only to strategies and styles of instruction, but also to the
facilitation and management of sustainable transformations, whether individual, social, structural or
institutional. Educators agree that the most important skills for students to get employment in the near
future are critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, media and information lit-
eracy, and capacity to collaborate. Many attempts to promote and develop these skills were made in
the past, but they remained limited to prototypes, and were usually considered as radical approaches
whose impact was most often limited to the margin of mainstream education systems. Today, as the
ubiquity of mobile technology supports the empowerment of learners, these skills are not only achiev-
able, they are also much closer to the very foundation of any education system adapted to current
needs.

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Table of Contents
Introduction.............................................................................................................................................3
I. Motivation factors for reforming education ........................................................................................4
I.1. From an economic and cultural perspective.................................................................................4
I.2. Access to quality education for all ...............................................................................................4
I.3. From centralized bureaucracies to student-centred learning environments .................................5
II. A medium or a message ? ..................................................................................................................5
II.1. Untangling the various purposes of ICT integration...................................................................6
II.2. From handicraft to industry.........................................................................................................7
II.3. A combination of learning and change management..................................................................8
III. Teaching and learning with technologies..........................................................................................8
III.1. The early ages of educational technologies...............................................................................9
III.2. Computer-mediated collaborative learning (CSCL)................................................................10
III.2.1. Instrument-mediated activity............................................................................................10
III.2.2. CSCL................................................................................................................................11
III.3. Teaching and learning with technologies today ......................................................................11
III.3.1. Problematic dichotomies..................................................................................................12
III.3.2. From the teacher’s perspective.........................................................................................12
III.3.3. From the learner’s perspective .........................................................................................13
III.4. Workplace learning and knowledge expansion .......................................................................14
III.4.1. The knowledge creation metaphor of learning.................................................................15
III.4.2. Boundaries between learning and the development of societal practices ........................15
III.5. Curriculum, as the ultimate limit of boundary-crossing..........................................................16
IV. Steps to decentralized, student-centred learning environments......................................................17
IV.1. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Programme ......................................................17
IV.1.1. A pedagogy of work, co-operation and enquiry...............................................................18
IV.2. The Qualification Framework Emirates..................................................................................19
IV.3. Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University............................................................................20
V. Concluding remarks .........................................................................................................................21
References.............................................................................................................................................22

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Introduction
Education has long been recognized as a critical mechanism for achieving development goals: it is
generally agreed that education is an inseparable component of solutions to many contemporary prob-
lems such as the population explosion and the climate crisis. In the transition process towards econo-
mies increasingly based on knowledge creation and dissemination, educational institutions, universi-
ties in particular, are urged to change, pressed by a sense of competitive urgency and the fear of being
left behind in the emerging knowledge-based economies. What educational challenges can be solved
with technology? What is learning in a knowledge society? These questions were raised at a
UNESCO round table on ‘Education and Knowledge Societies’ during the first World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS) in 2003. Eleven years later, it is not so obvious that we have found the
relevant and appropriate answers to these questions.
The term pedagogy - the art or science of being a teacher - refers nowadays not only to strategies and
styles of instruction, but also to the facilitation and management of sustainable transformations,
whether individual, social, structural or institutional. New flows of people make humans interact on a
daily basis with a diversity of others from diverse ethnic and cultural origins. As an answer to the in-
creasing uncertainty and heterogeneity of societies worldwide, fluctuating networks are emerging,
obeying complex logics, and raising new educational challenges.
With regard to education and learning in particular, global networks make centralized control less ef-
fective, suggesting educational institutions to shift their pedagogical strategies from teacher-centric to
learner-centric ones. Distributed control structures appear as appropriate alternatives, that blurs the
borders between education and the workplace, between formal and informal learning, between indi-
vidual and collective learning. Networked patterns of communication invite educational organizations
to adopt more systemic and flexible approaches beyond rigid hierarchical structures (as many modern
business organizations already do), so as to foster educational practices that involve individuals,
teams, and communities in meaningful organizational and societal practices. Internet provides the
necessary instruments to deploy e-learning strategies and increase dramatically the capacity of access
to education, and to redefine how learning occurs and how knowledge emerges beyond the borders of
traditional systems of education. Often associated with generic e-learning practices, open learning is
increasingly supported by policies and practices that minimize the barriers with respect to age, gender,
time constraints and recognition of prior learning, allowing the delivery of learning beyond time and
space constraints, in synchronous mode (same time, different locations) or asynchronous (different
time, different locations), thanks to the mediating instruments embedded in technology to transmit
content, to provide tuition, and to conduct assessment or measure outcomes.
E-Learning is now generally accepted as a generic term embracing online learning, Open Distance
Learning (ODL), and technology-enhanced learning. e-Learning approaches expand the capacity of
traditional systems of education to improve access, diversity, and quality, by opening creative spaces
where learning, innovation and work can be integrated. E-Learning deployment covers not only tech-
nology, but also strategies, policies, and practices for the enhancement of education with technology,
using flexible and scalable delivery modes at a distance, synchronously or asynchronously, among
many learning venues, so as to enable learner-centered activities distributed in space and time.

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I. Motivation factors for reforming education
I.1. Economic and cultural perspectives
According to the creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson (2010), the most prominent motivation factors to
reform education are both economic and cultural. Sir Robinson champions a radical rethinking of our
school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. From a cultural
perspective, an urgent shift is required to focus on learning rather than teaching, considering that
teaching is just a means of improving learning rather than an end in itself as it used to be. The con-
cept of knowledge society still remains an evolving work in progress in which employability issues
are often not so clear, and remain yet to be mastered. From an economic perspective, Ken Robinson
remarks that we are still trying to educate our children to take their place in the economy of the twen-
ty first century, ‘when we fail to anticipate how the economy will look like at the end of next week’.
John-Steiner and Moran (2002) had made a similar observation some eight years earlier, when they
wrote that educators and stakeholders face an ambiguous future where they need to ‘prepare children
and workers for what they themselves cannot foresee’.
I.2. Access to quality education for all
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG, 2002) were set at the eve of the twenty
first century to join efforts for securing access to quality education for all. However, in 2014, the
MDGs still remain an unachieved objective:
This learning crisis has costs not only for the future ambitions of children, but also for the current financ-
es of Governments. Around 250 million children are not learning basic skills, even though half of them
have spent at least four years in school. The annual cost of this failure: around 129 billion, noting that in
around a third of countries, less than 75 per cent of primary school teachers are trained according to na-
tional standards. Some 57 million children are not in school at all.
According to the Arab World Learning Barometer (Steer, 2014) - there are 3.1 million fewer children
out of school since 2002, but an estimated 8.5 million children remain excluded. Many of those chil-
dren are girls from poor, rural communities often living in regions affected by conflict. More children
are finishing primary school than ever before, yet in many countries more youth are dropping out of
lower secondary school than a decade ago. Using available learning assessments in thirteen Arab
countries, the average proportion of children not learning while in school stands at 56% at the primary
level and 48% at the lower secondary level. The lack of appropriate foundational skills has likely con-
tributed to the employment crisis in the region, and the dynamics between the education system and
the labor market need to be better understood (Faour, 2011).
The access to quality education for all is a crucial issue, and a major motivation factor for in-depth
education reforms. A quick look at demographic curves shows that it will never be possible to provide
access to education for the increasing population of the planet, nor will it be possible to train the huge
number of teachers required, if we continue to use traditional training methods and traditional modes
of delivery. To achieve the MDG goals, we need to revisit not only teachers’ education, but most un-
derlying education paradigms that were defined in the nineteenth century to meet the needs of the
emerging industrial revolution. Knowledge economies urgently require an increased learner centricity,
creativity, critical thinking, and scalable modes of delivery.

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I.3. From centralized bureaucracies to student-centered learning environments
Every year since 1999, the National Media Council of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) publishes a
Yearbook, covering all aspects of the evolution of the UAE society. In 2009, the chapter on Social
Development highlighted the central role of education as a key enabler, in the context of a wide range
of socio-economic challenges facing the country in the decades ahead. An epigraph to this chapter
tells the reader that ‘the challenge is to transform a centralized bureaucratic system into a student-
centered, decentralized learning environment’.
Although a cornerstone of the development of the region depends on accelerated educational devel-
opment and capacity building, most stakeholders are aware that these challenges will not be met
through the traditional forms of learning and process development. Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) are certainly powerful tools that have an important role to play in this decentrali-
zation process. Quantitative, structural and qualitative issues at individual, cultural and organizational
levels urge us to think out of the box. The potential of new technologies and media, as well as their
capacity to impact the mindsets, policies and educational structures, represent the most promising way
forward.
The impact will certainly depend on the extensive deployment of ICTs in the schools, colleges, uni-
versities, and other educational institutions. But before all, it will depend on their harmonious integra-
tion into the educational system, harmony that can be evaluated by an increased, focused and diversi-
fied usage. The pervasiveness of ICTs at all levels of the society actually provides us with the tools
and infrastructure required to achieve the desirable transformation of obsolete educational systems.
Will this be enough to increase at the same time access and quality? In that regard, the Arab Gulf will
be facing the same challenges as any other part of the world.
II. A medium or a message?
When Marshall McLuhan - well known as the inventor of the ‘Global Village’ - coined the statement
‘the Medium is the Message’, he meant that the form of a medium – educational technologies in our
case - embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences
how the message is perceived (McLuhan, 1964). However, the message depends not only on the me-
dium, but also on the intentions behind the medium, that is how the medium is deployed and used, so
as to build on its decentralized and open nature, and send a message that is well understood and does
not miss the point.
The new generations of digital natives are born in a world where every day, technology is becoming
more ubiquitous. This is illustrated in a fake interview published in the WIRED magazine by the
journalist Gary Wolf (2013) who imagined what Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) would answer if he
could be asked today about his belief about the medium and the message:
“The real message of media today is ubiquity. It is no longer something we do, but something we are part
of. It confronts us as if from the outside with all the sensory experience of the history of humanity. It is as
if we have amputated not our ears, or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis - an
automaton - in our place.”

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Ubiquitous mobile devices act as extensions of the individual (just like a total prosthesis would do)
allowing a synergy with servers and platforms, and enabling to share ideas and resources at world-
wide scale. This powerful combination invites to look at the networks as scalable fractal structures
whose communication patterns are similar and ‘self-replicable’ from small groups to large scale
worldwide organizations. The fractal nature of these networks has profound social implications based
on the ‘self-similarity’ characteristic of fractals.
In many different contexts, fractal networks implicitly support the bottom-up propagation of infor-
mation and social structuration from individuals to teams, to communities, or to large scale organiza-
tions, resulting in informal clouds that tend to challenge the structure of traditional organizations.
Thus, in terms of educational systems, we are witnessing the emergence of ‘learning clouds' that
claim to compete with the much more formal traditional educational structures and challenge them to
provide opportunities for similar learning - if not better and more accessible - to the same customers-
students. As pointed out by Professor Martin Bean, vice-chancellor of the UK Open University, « the
task of universities today is to provide paths from their informal cloud of learning towards formal
study for those who wish to take them ». To be relevant and adaptable to the needs of the society, edu-
cational institutions need to rethink their approach to learning, and propose a vision of societal and
individual development that integrates learning and the systemic reconstruction of social contexts in
which learning operates.
II.1. Untangling the various purposes of ICT integration
The deployment and use of technology in education will be better understood if we sort out its diverse
roles and clarify how it can serve different purposes, from economic objectives aimed at increasing
the access to education for all, to cultural objectives aimed at improving the quality of education,
transforming the way we teach, and ensuring more effective and efficient learning by acting as a
mind-opener.
The specific roles that ICT can play in the evolution of educational systems need to be disentangled,
and awareness to be raised about their specific impact on education, either as:
(1) a medium, a mode of delivery, or a tool for teaching at a distance;
(2) a subject matter whose aim is to build capacity in producing technology;
(3) a tool to enhance the learning and teaching of subjects across the curriculum;
(4) or a set of digital media supporting informal and lifelong learning.
The different usages cater for different objectives whose benefits must not be confused as this is too
often the case. During the past decades, a confusion between ICT as a medium, and ICT as a mind
opener allowing better learning opportunities, has proven to be very expensive for the education re-
forms in many developed countries. To add to this confusion, the task of integrating ICT into the
learning and teaching process was usually entrusted to technology teachers whose primary concern
was to cover their own IT curriculum, rather than to act as change agents who would facilitate the us-
age and integration of technologies across all disciplines.
The advent of tablets, smart phones and other mobile devices has been a key factor of change, be-
cause it changed the rules significantly by giving the keys of ICT integration into the learning process
to the students themselves, empowering the end-users and giving them much more control on their

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own learning, time management, and sources of information. Yet, there is a risk that this empower-
ment may contribute to lowering the standards, because of some misinterpretation by the learners
themselves of the apparent easiness of learning. A proper shift will be needed in teachers education, in
order to provide them with conceptual tools and methods that will ensure quality without restraining
the freedom and easiness of learning encouraged by these technologies.
II.2. From handicraft to industry
Education today is facing economic issues related to the increasing demand for access, urging us to
make economies of scale. As stated in the NMC Horizon Project Short List (2012):
economic pressures and new models of education are bringing unprecedented competition to the tradi-
tional models of tertiary education. Across the board, institutions are looking for ways to control costs
while still providing a high quality of service. Institutions are challenged by the need to support a steady
— or growing — number of students with fewer resources and staff than before.
In reaction to this pressure, most universities deploy online strategies and provide educational mate-
rials available by means of learning management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle, or De-
sire2Learn, among the most commonly used in the UAE (Al Suwaidi, 2013) and elsewhere in the
world. Another popular avatar of the LMS is the learning and content management systems (LCMS),
which is an LMS extended by a large databases of pre-packaged ‘learning objects’ as they are usually
called.
When they decide to go online, higher education institution face an accelerated industrialization pro-
cess in which teachers and academic are required to pass brutally from a status of respected artisans
who used to master all the steps of a clearly defined pedagogical process, to a status of skilled work-
ers participating in a supply chain of which they master only a few dimensions. What happens to edu-
cators today is comparable to what happened to the artisans at the eve of industrial era, in the nine-
teenth century. What Adam Smith wrote in 1776 about the wealth of nations, is still valid for educa-
tional systems more than two centuries later:
…economic growth is rooted in the increasing division of labor. This idea relates primarily to the spe-
cialization of the labor force, essentially the breaking down of large jobs into many tiny components.
Under this regime, each worker becomes an expert in one isolated area of production, thus increasing his
efficiency.(Smith, 1776)
The process of online course development requires specialization, and division of labor between con-
tent experts, instructional designers (or learning designers, depending on the perspective that one pre-
fers to adopt), delivery experts, and IT specialized support. In addition the huge amount of data (Big
Data) about the individual learning process increasingly available through e-learning platforms, will
even increase the specialization process at an horizon of two to three years. As per the NMC Horizon
report (2012), the field of learning analytics is a burgeoning body of work rooted in the study of big
data, which aims to use analytic techniques common in businesses to gain insights about student be-
havior and learning. Information derived from learning analytics can inform instructional practice in
real time, as well as aid in the design of course management systems that personalize education.
More recently, the transformation currently happening in higher education is comparable to the one
that happened in the music industry not so long ago, when entrepreneurs have reshaped entire indus-
tries in the space of a few years. In the future, getting the brightest entrepreneurial minds working on

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the challenges of higher education and providing them with the right support and guidance will be
critical. This recommendation is found in a recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research,
a UK’s leading progressive think tank, announcing that ‘an avalanche is coming in higher education’
(Barber, Donnelly & Rizvi, 2013).
From the viewpoint of administrators and stakeholders, the educational community needs effective
instructional design methodologies, supported and monitored by rigorous policies and quality assur-
ance frameworks encouraging teachers to work collaboratively and design effective innovative teach-
ing practices to creatively improve what they do, to design and test new ways of teaching, using learn-
ing technology, and to develop collectively professional knowledge, as advocated by Laurillard,
(2102).
II.3. A combination of learning and change management
During the last twenty years, this trend was clearly anticipated by several researchers in sociology,
management, or education, who proposed integrative models combining learning and change man-
agement at different levels.
The most prominent examples of such models are:
- Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (2005),
- Yrjö Engeström's expansive learning model (1987) and its application to professional
knowledge communities across the European Union (Hakkarainen, Palonen, Paavola,
Lehtinen, 2004; Paavola, Lipponen & Hakkarainen , 2004),
- Nonaka’s and Takeuchi's model of knowledge creation (1995),
- Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice (1998), applied later on to professional develop-
ment and business communities (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002), or
- Carl Bereiter's theory of knowledge building (2002).
All these models intend to provide the conceptual tools, analytical grids, and sometimes prescriptive
methods to analyze, trigger and sustain large scale transformations (educational in pour case), consid-
ering the co-evolution of social and technical processes from a systemic viewpoint in an evolutionary
perspective of education and culture. According to these authors, capacity will emerge from a synergy
between availability of resources, commitment to meaningful projects and human communities to
bring these projects to life. This is also the purpose of research on learning design as well as other
innovative methodologies for crossing boundaries between strategies of instruction on the one hand,
and management of sustainable transformations at the three levels of individuals, groups and organi-
zations on the other.
III. Teaching and learning with technologies
Technologies are not magic wands, they can only contribute to disseminate, scale up, reify and accel-
erate human intentions whatever these are (Senteni, Tamim, Holmes, 2010). There is no magic educa-
tional medium (and never will be) but there exist powerful technologies, flexible modes of delivery,
smart integration strategies, and effective policies allowing to increase access to quality education.

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The teachers themselves need to understand that ICTs have become an essential competency for the
teaching profession with a central role to play in the education paradigm shift. While welcoming the
open approach to the world allowed by ICT, it is important for teachers to understand the educational,
didactic, cultural and social issues at stake. ICTs are not, of themselves, generators of innovative edu-
cational change. They serve the behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist approaches equally well,
and they are conducive to individualistic confinement as well as to more cooperative forms of teach-
ing. The nature and quality of learning depend on the epistemological orientations to structure ICT
use (Aubé, 2000; David, Cantin & Aubé, 2002).
III.1. The early ages of educational technologies
The idea to use the latest technologies in the educational process is not a new one, neither are the re-
current confusions about how and why to do it, in relation with various possible objectives that need
first to be clarified. Universities started talking about educational technology in the nineteen sixties,
using mainly behaviorist approaches of computer-assisted instruction to propose drill and practice
exercises through purely textual teletypes terminals (Suppes & Morningstar, 1969).
A few years later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Seymour Papert, a mathemati-
cian, computer scientist, and educator, started working on learning theories, with a focus on the im-
pact of new technologies on learning, considering (maybe for the first time) schools as learning organ-
izations. Following his stay with Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva from 1958 to 1963, Papert
developed an original and highly influential theory on learning called ‘constructionism’ building on
the previous work of Jean Piaget in constructivism learning theories (Papert, 1980; Papert & Harel,
1991; Wadsworth, 1996).
Papert then created the Epistemology and Learning Research Group (which later became the MIT
Media Lab), where they started applying the constructionism theory to the development of the Logo
programming language whose main interest was to engage students in exploring mathematical proper-
ties visually, in a very practical way, via a simple ‘turtle’ device drawing lines across a personal com-
puter display. This visionary interactive learning environment was named a ‘turtle micro world’.
Several years later, Logo was still alive. In 2003, the Logo and Lego companies joined efforts to pro-
pose an educational robotic toolkit called Lego Mindstorms. In the meanwhile, Mitchell Resnick, a
former student of Seymour Papert, launched Scratch, a new programming language based on Logo,
and using again the concept of microworld. Scratch makes an extensive use of all the new features
provided by modern technologies, including simulations and visualizations of experiments, recording
lectures with animated presentations, social sciences animated stories, and interactive art and music
(Maloney, Resnick, Rusk, Silverman & Eastman, 2010).
In North America during the same period, another group of researchers started to work on Intelligent
Tutoring Systems (ITS) using artificial intelligence approaches - mainly rule-based expert systems -
to bring more reasoning into computer-assisted instruction systems so as to make them less mechani-
cal, and closer to the needs and sensitivity of the learners, and therefore more effective (Sleeman &
Brown,1982)(Brown & Burton, 1978). In a famous report of the computer science department at Stan-
ford University, William Clancey (1982) proposed the first methodology for building intelligent tutor-
ing systems, using a rule-based expert system making medical diagnosis called Mycin as a case-study:

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“Over the past five years, we have been developing a computer program to teach medical diagnosis. Our
research synthesizes and extends results in artificial intelligence (AI), medicine, and cognitive psychology
[…] The general problem has been to develop an intelligent tutoring system by adapting the MYCIN ex-
pert system. This conversion requires a deeper understanding of the nature of expertize and explanation
than originally required for developing MYCIN, and a concomitant shift in perspective from simple per-
formance goals to attaining psychological validity in the program's reasoning process.”
From the nineteen seventies, the evolution of ITS has boosted the research on virtual learning envi-
ronments and semantic web, providing most of the concepts underlying the educational technology
platforms in use nowadays (Woolf, 2009) (Nkambou, Bourdeau & Mizoguchi, 2010).
We can see there that there has always been different schools of thought, advocating competing ap-
proaches on how to use technology to enhance learning.
The one embodied in microworlds such as the Logo turtle, proposes to use educational technologies in
constructionist instructional designs. It proposes open learning environments fostering exploration
and learning by doing. Students are given room to explore, and determine their own goals and learn-
ing activities. Under this conception, learning is fostered and supported, but not controlled or dictated
in any strict fashion (EdutechWiki, 2014). The name itself of intelligent tutoring systems shows a
more instructional inclination, focusing mainly on teaching, rather than learning. ITSs aim to provide
immediate and customized instruction and feedback to learners, usually with no intervention of a hu-
man teacher. ITSs and microworlds embody two extremes of the educational range available within
the scope of educational technologies. During the last forty years, these two competing approaches
although often complementary, have raised discussions whose origin were rather divergent pedagogi-
cal conceptions rather than issues related to the technology itself.
III.2. Computer-mediated collaborative learning (CSCL)
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the study of the schemes of usage and integration of
technology has given birth to an important research community known as computer-supported collab-
orative learning (CSCL) that defines its object of study as meaning and the practices of meaning-
making in the context of joint activity. CSCL looks into the ways in which these practices are medi-
ated through designed artifacts (Koschmann, 2002). The emergence of CSCL research coincides with
the advent of social networks of which they seek to understand the mechanisms, motivations, and im-
pacts.
III.2.1. Instrument-mediated activity
Béguin and Rabardel (2000) define a mediating instrument by its two components:
(1) an artifact which may be material or symbolic, produced by the subject or by others; and
(2) one (or more) associated schemes, resulting from a construction specific to the subject, or
through the appropriation of pre-existing social schemes. Together, scheme plus artifact act as the
mediator between the subject and the object of his/her activity :
An activity consists of acting upon an object in order to realize a goal and give concrete form to a motive.
Yet the relationship between the subject and the object is not direct. It involves mediation by a third par-
ty: the instrument [...] An instrument cannot be confounded with an artifact. An artifact only becomes an
instrument through the subject‟s activity. In this light, while an instrument is clearly a mediator between
the subject and the object, it is also made up of the subject and the artifact. (Béguin & Rabardel, 2000,
pp.175)

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Technology-mediated pedagogy is concerned with the patterns of usage of the new technological
tools, starting with casual use at the individual level, to eventually become part of an organizational
culture in the best cases. A tool (artifact) associated with a temporary, sporadic usage, becomes an
instrument and acquires its full status when it is socially and culturally integrated. For example, this is
the case of smart phones whose status over the last decade has moved rapidly from tools (or artifacts)
when Apple just launched the iPhone, to instruments giving rise to the establishment of new social
practices, through social networks or online educational platforms. Beyond a simple technological
tool, an instrument can also be a non-digital conceptual tool, such as a change management process or
an innovation policy whose impact will not be limited to practices but will extend to the beliefs of the
users, so as to support the scheme of integration of the instrument into meaningful individual and so-
cial practices.
III.2.2. CSCL
The concern for a process-oriented account of collaboration underlies most research on CSCL during
the last two decades (Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye & O’Malley 1996; Stahl, 2002ab; Engeström & Sun-
tio, 2002; Paavola et al., 2004) from individuals to dyades, to finally larger social contexts in which
groups interact with other groups to produce learning and create knowledge (Engeström, 2004). The
processes and practices of meaning-making focuses on the social practices themselves, rather than on
individuals’ practices in social settings. Stahl (2002ab) argues that an adequate theoretical foundation
for CSCL must explain how individual practices are social without forgetting that the social is
grounded in individual activities. Concepts of praxis, activity, social reproduction, structuration and
enactment begin to address this dialectic. More generally, Stahl’s formulation, as well as Kosch-
mann’s more elaborated definition (2002), include the study of ‘the ways in which these [meaning-
making] practices are mediated through designed artifacts.‟ Koschmann refers mainly to software
objects designed to support collaborative learning, precisely CSCL technology acting as a mediation
artifact.
III.3. Teaching and learning with technologies today
The previous sections return on history in order to recall that the mutual benefits and evolving rela-
tionship between technology and education have recurrently raised more or less the same questions
during the last fifty years. Every new technology seems to offer unlimited promise to learning. It is
usually harnessed by different schools of thoughts who all try to promote their own ideas and get the
most benefits out of it. If it is clear for many educators and learners that technology is the answer, on-
ly a few remember what were the initial questions. It is important to understand what is actually new,
what has actually changed since the first attempts to use technologies in education in the early nine-
teen sixties.
The ubiquity of mobile devices and their increasingly well established status, as privileged instru-
ments of learning, along with the expansion and democratization of the Internet, are certainly among
the most important elements of change that urge us to rethink the strategies of the whole education
systems. From cloud computing, to mobile communications and Internet applications, many sectors
have benefitted from harnessing innovative uses of technology, but one key question remains unan-
swered for education (Luckin, Bligh, Manches, Ainsworth, Crook & Noss, 2012): has the range of
technologies helped improve learners’ experiences and the standards they achieve?

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III.3.1. Problematic dichotomies
Though technology opens a wide range of possibilities for the enhancement and support of learning,
some researchers argue that their effective impact is restricted by narrow conceptualizations of learn-
ing, based on three pervasive but problematic dichotomies between:
 education and the workplace (associated to an opposition between formal and informal learning);
 individual and collective learning;
 learning and the development of societal practices.
These dichotomies were first highlighted by Virkkunen (2005), a researcher from Finland whose work
with Engeström (1987, 2004; Engeström et al, 2002), Hakkarainen (2004), and Paavola (2004) con-
tributed a great deal to understanding the success of the Finnish education system. Let us recall that
the Finnish education system managed to top the OECD PISA rankings in 2000, 2003, and 2006, and
consistently ranked near the top in other years.
III.3.2. From the teacher‟s perspective
Nowadays pedagogy - the art or science of being a teacher - refers not only to strategies or styles of
instruction but also to the facilitation and management of sustainable transformations, whether indi-
vidual, social, structural or institutional. John-Steiner and Moran (2002) remark that teachers are ex-
pected to participate in knowledge creation while they belong and report to educational structures that
often react to the ambient uncertainty in a defensive way, relying on more rigorous procedures, more
control, and more bureaucratic rigidity to tackle the problem. It is difficult to ask teachers to promote
innovative learning and participate actively in knowledge advancement, while at the same time, ex-
pecting them to transmit pre-packaged contents and increase the scores of students on standardized
tests of so-called basic skills and memorized items of information that require mainly rote learning.
This double constraint is at the root of the crisis in pedagogy investigated by the Australian philoso-
pher R.J. Parkes:
I want to localize it as a crisis in my own pedagogy. It is a crisis of both meaning and practice [...] which
I would suggest, reflects some notion of the death of certainty. If indeed the postmodern turn can be said
to have brought an uncertainty about the status of our knowledge and disciplines, then mainstream peda-
gogies that focus on the efficient delivery of pre-packaged content are, in societies (or for pedagogues)
experiencing postmodern instabilities, an anachronism. (Parkes, 2000, p.1)
Considering the current multiplication of entities - human, technological, conceptual - one has to co-
exist with, pedagogy is also supposed to provide children (and older students as well) with consistent
answers to very basic questions. How many are we on this planet? Are we able to live together? It is
commonly agreed that education has a major role to play in anticipating on, and participating in ‘the
progressive composition of a common word’ that would become livable for a larger majority (Latour,
2005). Though, talking about pedagogy in such a holistic way that not only addresses the wholeness
of human beings, but also questions their social insertion and their contribution to transforming the
society for a better future, raises challenges about its objects. From a somehow well-defined scientific
discipline in education, one diverts slowly but surely towards a fuzzy venture in sociology and epis-
temology.

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However, we claim a conception of pedagogy that include a significant amount of critical interpreta-
tion and translation of ideas, taking into account teacher’s and student’s creativities and subjectivities,
and thus reintroducing awareness and dialogism as an important part of knowledge-building and
meaning-making processes, allowing teachers to remain mediators taking advantage of the possibili-
ties offered by ICT to support innovative conceptualizations of learning, rather than becoming mere
intermediaries. The need to reintroduce awareness, subjectivity, and dialogism in pedagogy is there at
all levels, not limited to K12 education. We find the same expectation for higher education, in several
models such as the conversational framework for an effective use of learning technologies, considered
as a reference in the domain (Laurillard, 1993, 2002 for the second edition).
In a famous book about lessons that the world can learn from educational changes in Finland, Sahl-
berg (2011) explains that a key factor of the success of the Finnish education system is the effort put
by the government of Finland on research-based teachers education programs, considering K12 teach-
ers as researchers, that is professionals with an expertise in research and pedagogy. The success of
this approach, benchmarked against PISA criteria, is an evidence of the strong impact of the research-
based preparation on the expected responsibility of educators to transcend their traditional role and
expand the scope of their work towards an active participation to knowledge advancement.
A similar claim is made by Laurillard (2012) who invites us to consider teachers as expert designers,
explaining in more details the role of technology as a facilitator of the learning design process. Like
other design professionals (e.g. architects or engineers) teachers have to work out creative and evi-
dence-based ways of improving what they do. Every day, they design and test new ways of teaching,
using learning technology to help their students. The technology offers the necessary platforms (e.g.
Moodle or Blackboard) to create, share, and adapt learning designs, building on the designs of others,
so as to develop this vital professional knowledge collectively. Technology also provides the tools to
articulate, represent and communicate their pedagogy in the form of structured pedagogical patterns
leading to innovative teaching, and more effective learning.
III.3.3. From the learner’s perspective
From a learner’s perspective, Finnish education insists on the pleasure to learn, collaborative learning,
learning across settings, a lack of focus on examinations, and more recess time:
« Reading, science, and mathematics are important in Finnish education system but so are social studies,
arts, music, physical education, and various practical skills. Play and joy of learning characterize Fin-
land's pre-schools and elementary classrooms. Many teachers and parents in Finland believe that the
best way to learn mathematics and science is to combine conceptual, abstract learning with singing,
drama, and sports. This balance between academic and non-academic learning is critical to children's
well-being and happiness in school. » (Sahlberg, 2011)
Another perspective coming from the UK is found in a NESTA report on the proof, promise, and po-
tential of digital education (Luckin et al., 2012) that looks at the impact of technology on learning
from different angles:
• learning from experts or with others;
• learning through making, exploring, inquiry, or practicing
• learning from assessment;
• or learning in and across settings

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While most of these perspectives have been extensively studied for a long time by researchers in edu-
cation, the emergence of mobile technologies raises an increased interest for the learning across set-
tings, that seems now more achievable thanks to those new devices. Luckin and her colleafgues found
that learners improve their knowledge and deepen their understanding when they apply their learning
across different locations, representations, and activities. The NESTA report also points out how
technology can help in this regard: teachers and learners can use a variety of devices to capture, store,
compare, and integrate material from a variety of settings.
Laurillard (2012) proposes another classification of the types of learning, maybe closer to Anderson
& Krathwohl’s digital taxonomy (2001), itself based on the classical Bloom’s taxonomy of learning
objectives. Laurillard identifies six different types of learning:
• acquisition,
• discussion,
• investigation,
• practice,
• collaboration,
• production,
showing how these different experiences, can be achieved with either conventional technology (e.g.
books, or face-to-face traditional class) or digital ones (multimedia, websites, online tutorials, simula-
tions, etc.). As did Bloom digital taxonomy earlier on, each classification adds to the other, allowing
to link technologies with explicit types of learning, and measurable learning outcomes expressed with
the verbs attached to the different types (acquire, discuss, etc.). As illustrated in a recent UNESCO
research project on ICT in primary education (UNESCO-IITE, 2014), the taxonomies of learning
types and measurable learning objectives are useful tools and conceptual artifacts to better structure
technology-enhanced projects and improve the effectiveness of ICT integration to improve learning.
III.4. Workplace learning and knowledge expansion
Boundaries between informal and formal learning are often equated to boundaries between education
and the workplace because informal methods of learning are most often found in the work environ-
ment as just-in-time answers to quick and frequent changes. Project-based and outcome-based learn-
ing, most often mediated by technology, are seen as techniques that a learner can take quick ad-
vantage of, using work-related resources. These methods are more student-driven and job-relevant
than any formal options; they are also less time consuming and usually more affordable than formal
ones for which advanced mature learners have usually less time. These learners want to be considered
mature enough to be responsible for their own learning, so that they can drive it in a meaningful, self-
directed manner. In addition, if a good part of these learning activities can be done online - as this is
often the case - asynchronous e-learning sessions offer an increased flexibility, well adapted to the
needs of those who are interested in learning during their working hours.
According to (Engeström, 2004), the emergence of new types of work organization requires a better
understanding of special learning modes which will contribute to professional development and
change management in organizations engaged in a combined process of development and restructu-
ration, while simultaneously operating according to previously defined rules. In his model, Engeström
proposes two axes of development (vertical and horizontal) associated to different learning modes:

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- on a vertical scale, the model goes from the exploitation of what is already known to the explo-
ration of newly created knowledge;
- on an horizontal scale, the model goes from the given context of activity to the emerging one.
In a context of transformation for example, the North-East corner of Engestrom’s diagram would cor-
respond to the exploration of newly created knowledge in the context of an emerging activity, that is
learning as a knowledge creation activity.
III.4.1.The knowledge creation metaphor of learning
Derived from Engeström’s theory of learning by expanding, the knowledge creation metaphor of
learning (Paavola et al., 2004) overcomes the separation of the cognitive (associated to an acquisition
metaphor of learning embedded in transmissive models) and, the situative (associated to a participa-
tion metaphor where learning occurs through situated activities), to finally focus on a creative dimen-
sion of learning that intends to open avenues for the expansion of ‘aknowledged knowledge‟ towards
newly created one. Beyond the ‘flux of doing’ emphasizing situatedness of action and participation on
social interaction in authentic situations, the knowledge creation metaphor of learning focusses on the
process of developing and creating new knowledge. This metaphor is a conceptual instrument to cross
boundaries between individual learning, collective learning and development of new organizational
practices in educational settings. It can serve as the basis of pedagogical approaches to trigger and
support changes requiring an organization to operate in a different way based on concerted and con-
tinuous teamwork, according to new benchmarks of not only individual, but also collective perfor-
mance, all paradigmatic changes putting at stakes learning in the knowledge society.
Although human activity is creative by nature, its ability to exceed and transcend given constraints
and instructions is not encouraged in traditional teaching and learning systems. The approaches pre-
sented above give a special importance to creative abilities in knowledge communities and societies
whose new way of looking at value creation depends on their ability to create wealth by fostering in-
novation, creativity and entrepreneurship. Answers to these challenges for developing leadership,
communication, innovation and collaboration cannot be found in the Cartesian rational, logical, and
scientific perspective:
In today‟s information, technological and innovation driven society, creativity has become more of a ne-
cessity for psychological health and life success. It can no longer be viewed as a luxury or marginal to
„the good life‟; it is essential to society‟s ability to develop and work under conditions of fast-paced
change. Societies have become more global and people must learn to interact with a diversity of others.
Schools and other social institutions are having difficulty effectively educating and training people for a
future that is ambiguous: how can teachers and leaders prepare children and workers for what they
themselves cannot foresee? Vygotsky‟s notions of meaning-making, creativity development and the com-
plementary development of cultures and individuals provide foundations for dealing with these growing
issues.
Vygotsky‟s dialectical and synthesizing methods become viable models for development and action. Crea-
tivity and development are both objective and subjective processes, involving not only shared public
meanings and objects, but also personal experiences and transformations. (John-Steiner & Moran, 2002.
p.123)
III.4.2. Boundaries between learning and the development of societal practices

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Another important aspect of Engestrom’s approach is its ‘localism’, striving to overcome the gap be-
tween the micro and the macro level of analysis that cuts across most theoretical and methodological
questions raised in the social sciences during the last decades:
The behavioral and social sciences have cherished a division of labor that separates the study of socioec-
onomic structures from the study of individual behavior and human agency. In this traditional framework,
the socioeconomic structures look stable, all-powerful, and self-sufficient. The individual may be seen as
an acting subject who learns and develops, but somehow the actions of the individual do not seem to have
any impact on the surrounding structures [...] More than ever before, there is a need for an approach that
can dialectically link the individual and the social structure. (Engeström, 1999, p.19)
[...] This approach implies a radical localism. The [...] fundamental societal relations and contradictions
[...] are present in each and every local activity of that society. And conversely, the mightiest, most im-
personal social structures can be seen as consisting of local activities carried out by concrete human be-
ings with the help of mediating artifacts... (Ibid. p. 36)
Engestrom invites us to make explicit the dialectic link between individuals and the social structure in
which they operate, and to raise questions about the relationship between competences and knowledge
of the individuals (but also their subjectivities) on the one hand, and authority on the other. As he
points out, the mightiest and most impersonal social structures are not disembodied but rather personi-
fied by concrete human beings. To be achievable, knowledge creation supposes that each individual
engaged in knowledge development is implicitly committed to change. No single actor has the sole
authority, no single actor is in a position of preventing the others from having an impact on their sur-
rounding structures which is not the case in traditional educational or even professional development
settings.
Are these new concepts, emerging at the eve of a digital era ? Certainly not, the same concerns are
found more than a century ago in the writings of John Dewey, a famous American philosopher and
educational reformer who is considered today as a major voice of progressive education and liberal-
ism. Dewey considered schools and civil society as two fundamental elements needing attention and
reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality:
"I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school
is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated […] I believe that
education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. […] I believe that the
teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the
school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the
community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding
to these influences." (John Dewey, 1897)
What is new however is the instrumental role of mobile technologies and social networks to reactivate
the dialectical relationship between individuals and social structures, offering increased facilities for
lifelong learning, as an ongoing process of living, rather than a preparation for future living.
III.5. Curriculum, as the ultimate limit of boundary-crossing
Far from a conception of the curriculum based on a ‘mind-as-a-container’ vision, strongly criticized
by many researchers (Bereiter, 2002; Paavola et al., 2004), one would like to see it as an evolving,
socially constructed set of values and beliefs reflecting relations between competing visions of the
world and professional cultures. The weight of a traditional vision of the curriculum conveying
whole-class instructional methods, does not come only from abstract educational structures, but often
from the teachers themselves. Amongst the numerous reasons explaining their reluctance to abandon

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traditional methods relying on individual seat-work, one finds the increasing pressure of accountabil-
ity for delivering a centrally determined curriculum and for increasing the scores of their students on
standardized tests of so-called basic skills and memorized items of information.
The challenge for policy makers is to design prescribed curricula that support contextualization and
customization in such a way that the expected knowledge and skills defined by the learning outcomes
of educational programs are also directly applicable to activities of personal and social significance
for the learners:
Vygotskyan theory, or social constructivism as we might call its application to education, thus calls for an
approach to learning and teaching that is both exploratory and collaborative. It also calls for a recon-
ceptualization of curriculum in terms of the negotiated selection of activities that challenge students to go
beyond themselves towards goals that have personal significance for them (Vygotsky, 1978, chap.8).
The immediate consequence of a re-conceptualizing of the curriculum as a set of negotiated activities
that have personal significance for the students, is the (re)-introduction in pedagogy of new forms of
subjectivity, based on multi-voiced, negotiated visions of knowledge, subject to power relations de-
termining what is to be considered the truth (Foucault, 1982) :
Bringing Foucault into relationship with Vygotsky highlights the way in which discursive regimes might
influence the kinds of subjectivities that are constructed within a ZPD. A Foucauldian reading of activity
in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) suggests that what is developed in the zone is not only com-
petences, but also subjectivities, as discursive practices that construct such subjectivities are appropriat-
ed. (Parkes, 2000, p.10)
IV. Steps to decentralized, student-centered learning environments in the UAE
In this section, we will take some examples of ongoing projects aiming to gradually transform the
UAE educational system into a decentralized, student-centered learning environment, namely the
Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Program, the Qualification Framework Emirates, and the
Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University.
IV.1. The Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Program
The Smart Learning Program initiative (2103) was launched in 2012, and introduced in the schools of
the UAE this academic year with the objective to have it fully deployed in all K-12 government clas-
ses by 2017. The focus of the Smart Learning Program is on the development of educational process-
es by providing the latest technologies in UAE schools, in order to create a learning environment that
keep pace with the technology developments, and enrich their minds with the skills that their nation
needs to fuel its knowledge economy. The program intends to foster the commitment of teachers, stu-
dents, parents and administrators beyond school walls, and to encourage the spirit of research, analy-
sis and evaluation, innovation and initiative. The learning environment provided by the Smart Learn-
ing supports differentiated teaching and learning, provide students with twenty first century skills and
critical thinking, and focus on learner centricity, so as to promote a sense of belonging to prevent
dropout and encourage school completion.
In April 2012, on the launching of the Smart Learning Program, H.H. Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid
Al Maktoum, Prime Minister and Vice-President of the UAE, was discussing the best use of tablet
PCs in education with young students, expressing the will of the government « to provide the new

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generation with the skills needed for the future ». Educators agree that the most important skills for
the future are critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, media and information
literacy, and collaboration, which are the highlights of the Smart Learning Program. Many attempts to
promote these skills were made in the past, but they remained limited mainly to prototypes and pilot
projects, most often considered as radical approaches whose impact was limited to the margin of
mainstream education systems. The new opportunity today comes from the ubiquity of mobile tech-
nologies, encouraging an accelerated empowerment of the learners, and making these skills not only
achievable, but much closer to the very foundations of up to date education systems.
IV.1.1. A pedagogy of work, co-operation and enquiry
As explained above, it would be wrong to think that the advocacy for critical thinking and problem
solving, creativity and innovation, media and information literacy, and collaboration, came with the
emergence of mobile technologies. Long before the advent of computers and the Internet, in France,
in the middle of the twentieth century, a good example is provided by the ‘Cooperative Institute of the
Modern School’ who then encouraged the same pedagogy as the one which is advocated in the Smart
Learning Program.
The cooperative institute of the modern school (Institut Coopératif de l‟Ecole Moderne - ICEM) was
created in 1947 by Celestin Freinet (1990,1993, for the english translation). Its essential concepts
were very close of those of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and knowledge building commu-
nities (Bereiter, 2002; Hakkarainen et al., 2004). Freinet’s concept of ‘learning through work’ focused
on work as the process of spontaneous re-organization of life in school and society. Freinet defines
work as the basis of every human activity, of the development of human beings, and therefore consid-
ers productive work as an ongoing principle of teaching and learning, to be brought closer to the idea
of object-oriented human activity and knowledge creation discussed in some previous sections of this
paper.
In 1924, Freinet introduced the Learning Printing Technique, in which the children were using a
printing press to reproduce texts that they had composed freely, out of their own personal adventures,
the incidents that they had experienced inside and outside the classroom, and so on. Freinet used the
printing press as the privileged technology and mediating artifact of his pedagogy:
• pedagogy of work (pupils learn by making useful products or providing useful services);
• cooperative learning (based on co-operation in a productive process);
• enquiry-based learning (a trial and error method involving group work);
• the ‘Natural Method’ (based on an inductive, global approach);
• centers of interest (based on children’s learning interests and curiosity).
Usually these texts were then presented to the class, discussed, corrected and edited as a collaborative
endeavor by the whole class, before being finally printed by the children themselves working togeth-
er. Freinet called this approach Free Writing. Later these texts were assembled to create a Class Jour-
nal and a School Newspaper. The program proposed by Freinet in his times was certainly a visionary
smart learning program, whose scope and impact was unfortunately limited by the power the only
technologies then available.

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IV.2. The Qualification Framework Emirates
A second example of a good, contemporary framework guiding the definition of the curriculum in a
proper direction is the Qualification Framework Emirates (QFEmirates) adopted in 2012 by the Min-
istry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR) of the UAE government, with the in-
tention to provide a single reference point to compare qualifications nationally, regionally and interna-
tionally, QFEmirates indicates how the generic outcomes required from programs and courses; it ad-
dresses the need for transparent mechanisms for assuring quality, rigor and consistency of qualifica-
tions for the country, employers, community and students (QFEmirates, 2012).
At each level, above the general secondary school certificate (G12), from diploma to doctoral degrees,
QFEmirates provides higher education institutions with a set of guidelines outlining the learning out-
comes of academic programs and courses offered at all levels, in terms not only of knowledge and
skills, but also of ‘aspects of competence’ that a learner is expected to know and be able to do.
Starting from a rather classical definition of knowledge (as the cognitive representation of ideas,
events or happenings learned from practical or professional experience as well as from formal instruc-
tion or study), QFEmirates follows with skills and the concept of ‘know-how’, defined as the proce-
dural knowledge required to carry out a task. But what constitutes its originality and modernity is cer-
tainly the importance given to the ‘aspects of competence‟ that make explicit the contexts in which
the learners can apply their knowledge and skills, making an explicit reference to activitities of per-
sonal and social significance for the learners:
‟…aspects of competence is the effective and creative deployment of knowledge and skill in human situa-
tions, including general social and civic life, as well as specific occupational contexts. Aspects of compe-
tence also encompasses the learner‟s ability to acknowledge the boundaries of their knowledge and skill
and plan to transcend these through further learning. Aspects of competence is typically acquired by
practice and reflection.‟ (QFEmirates, 2012, p. 98)
QFEmirates is a useful toll not only for the institutions and the educators who design the programs,
but also for the students to make informed decisions about their education and training progression,
mobility between levels, institutions, and in relation to employment opportunities.

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IV.3. Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University
Created in 2002 with a focus on Total Quality Management (TQM), the eTQM college became
Hamdan Bin Mohammed e-University (HBMeU) in February 2009, with an emphasis on e-learning as
the future of education and empowerment in the region. The pioneering vision of HBMeU paved the
way for the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR) to design stand-
ards for accreditation for e-learning institutions. In February 2014, Dubai’s quest to transform itself
into a smart city within the next three years brought HBMeU to become HBMSU - Hamdan Bin Mo-
hammed Smart University - thus highlighting its pro-active commitment to pioneer smart learning
and become the university of choice in the Arab World.
In an approach that actually blurs the borders between education and the workplace, HBMSU propos-
es a flexible model of education, known as 4Cs (Figure 1), addressing four different categories of
learners:
 Casual [learners attending workshops, seminars or conferences];
 Committed [learners enrolled in professional development certificates or diplomas]
 Concentrated [learners enrolled in bachelors, masters, or PhD]
 Continuing [lifelong executive development for stakeholders
This rich offer includes customized courses and certificates articulating adult education, educational
technology, leadership and management into a mosaic of customized short courses, to answer the spe-
cific needs of lifelong learners, and provide them opportunities for enhancing and developing addi-
tional skills and knowledge throughout one's professional life. For example, HBMSU offers opportu-
nities for informal learning at all ages, as well as post-school support for school kids to several mil-
lions of registered users of the Cloud Campus platform, a smart learning initiative launched in part-
nership with a private consortium called Global Learning.

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Another example of HBMSU smart approach, is the Certificate in Instruction and e-Learning (CIEL)
an example of a pedagogy of work, reflexive and critical thinking, co-operation and enquiry.
Launched in September 2013, CIEL is a job-embedded, professional development program whose
target audience is composed of instructors from different domains of expertize at different levels, en-
gaged in shifting their teaching practices from traditional to online. CIEL supports them in this transi-
tion process, showing by example how to excel in online teaching, using HBMSU best practices as
case studies. The CIEL twelve weeks program uses a blend of job-embedded strategies closely con-
nected to the participants’ actual day-to-day online teaching, and learning management functions and
tasks. It provides them with the knowledge, skills, autonomy, and self-development capacities needed
to deliver quality online teaching, to create and manage meaningful smart contents, to assess the pro-
gress of their own learners, and to continuously improve their own practice and teaching expertize.
In addition to a limited set of online lectures covering the most important concepts of online and
smart education, a continuous and personalized support is offered to the participants by an interna-
tional pool of experienced coaches and advisors who help them in the transition process from tradi-
tional to online teaching. CIEL participants are assessed on the progress and improvement of their
own online teaching practice during the semester, based on a personal critical reflection on their own
teaching practice, advanced problem-solving skills, formulation of judgment, professional knowledge
and practice in unfamiliar learning contexts.
During the twelve weeks of the program, participants are required to maintain a reflective blog of
their weekly experience of online teaching, and to produce a portfolio of documented best practices in
learning design, instructional design, social communication and interaction, management and admin-
istration of their own courses in accordance with international standards and policies, and evidences
of their ability to make the most of the opportunities offered by technology for the implementation of
appropriate pedagogies, thus demonstrating their capacity to develop and implement further learning
consistently and sensitively after the end of the program. CIEL learning outcomes indicate self-
directed, comprehensive, highly specialized knowledge and practical skills in the field of online edu-
cation. CIEL has been endorsed by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and
was also short listed as an e-Learning innovator in the EFQL HOTEL contest (HOlistic approach to
Technology Enhanced Learning) launched in the context of the European Union 7th Framework Pro-
gram whose aim is to design, develop and test a support model for innovation in the area of Technol-
ogy-Enhanced Learning.
V. Concluding remarks
In this paper, we have tried to provide some modest and certainly partial answers to questions about
the educational challenges that can be solved with technology, and also to clarify what is meant by
learning in a knowledge society.
About the educational challenges that can be solved with technology, we stated that technologies are
not magic wands: they can only contribute to the dissemination, scaling up, reification and accelera-
tion human intentions, whatever these are. There is no magic educational medium (and never will be)
but there exist powerful technologies, flexible modes of delivery, smart integration strategies, and
effective policies allowing to increase access to quality education.

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Today, digital literacy - and increasingly, digital expertise - is an essential competency for the teach-
ing profession with a central role to play in an education paradigm shift. While welcoming the open
approach to the world allowed by ICT, it is important for teachers to understand the educational, di-
dactic, cultural and social issues at stake. ICTs are not, of themselves, generators of innovative educa-
tional change. They serve the behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist approaches equally well, and
they are conducive to individualistic confinement as well as to more cooperative forms of teaching.
The nature and quality of learning depend on the epistemological orientations to structure ICT use.
What should we, as educators, mean by learning in a knowledge society? Pedagogy refers nowadays
not only to strategies and styles of instruction, but also to the facilitation and management of sustain-
able transformations, whether individual, social, structural or institutional. Educators agree that the
most important skills for students to get employment in the near future are critical thinking and prob-
lem solving, creativity and innovation, media and information literacy, and capacity to collaborate.
Many attempts to promote and develop these skills were made in the past, but they remained limited
to prototypes and pilot projects, most often considered as radical approaches whose impact was lim-
ited to the margin of mainstream educational systems. Today, the ubiquity of mobile technologies
support the empowerment of learners, and makes these skills not only achievable, but much closer to
the very foundations of up to date education systems.
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