ITWorx Delivers State-of-the-Art e-Learning Solution in Maarif Data Centre in Riyadh

RIYADH, November 10, 2010 (Press-News.org) KSA: ITWorx, the Middle East's leading software professional services firm and a global expert in e-learning products and services, announced the successful deployment and customization of its Connected Learning Gateway (CLG) platform to deliver the hosted Maarif Learning Gateway in Riyadh-based Maarif Data Centre.

Maarif, the Saudi education and training company, is the owner of some of the major and oldest educational institutions throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, like Manarat Schools and Faisaliah Islamic School Al Khober. The company aims to pioneer the private education sector by introducing e-learning into its schools and shift from traditional education into the era of digital and mobile unique educational experiences for teachers, students, and parents.

Based on CLG and its add-on products: AuthorExpert, ExamExpert, AttendanceExpert and Catalyst, ITWorx delivered an e-learning platform that serves 15 Manarat school, with more than 22,000 users including students, teachers, and parents. Maarif is already using the hosted "AuthorExpert" to create a repository of centralized e-learning resources to be used and shared by all parties via an electronic environment accessible anytime and anywhere.

ITWorx also completed a one month adoption program to ensure optimal usage of the platform. The adoption program was tailored for system administrators and content authors, to guarantee they have digested all of the CLG value-added benefits and will be able to utilize its tools in delivering an exciting rich e-learning experience. Together with Marrif, ITWorx also planned and delivered walkthroughs to parents explaining how to login and access the monthly grades of their students; encouraging their active participation in the e-learning process. To save costs, ITWorx also provisioned students email accounts on Live@edu and with single-sign-on access from Maarrif's Learning Gateway, students could see all their Live@edu emails and appointments.

"We are very pleased to cooperate with a well-respected private educational institution in the KSA like Maarif that is keen on applying the state-of-the-art technologies to their educational process. We employed our CLG platform with all its tools and services to offer an unrivalled e-learning solution customised to the need of Maarif and hosted at their data center. ITWorx doesn't just deliver the technology but we follow up on full adoption; providing onsite training and mentorship to pilot teachers and students to guarantee a smooth transfer into the new space of digital information," said Medhat Karam, General Manager Education, ITWorx.

The CLG platform is a dynamic, multilingual social learning platform that serves K12 public and private education institutions. CLG is intuitive for teachers, attractive for students, inviting for parents, decision-enabler for principals, and easy-to-handle for administrators. Built on Microsoft SharePoint, and with a family of easy-to-use products, CLG provides a window that boosts e-learning and collaboration in the classroom, at home, and on hand-held device while rendering attendance, assignments, examination, grading, and performance reporting easy and automatic procedures.

"Contributing to the development of this community through a generation that knows how to think critically and who masters the latest technologies of the modern information society, comes at the heart of our mission at Maarif. ITWorx has been a great partner helping us host a customised, bilingual e-learning solution in our data center, in a very short period of time, to serve 15 of our Manart schools with more than 22,000 users in KSA while integrating students' emails with Live@edu," said Ashraf ElGuindi, Chairman of the Executive Board, Maarif Education & Training Holding Co, KSA.

"We are particularly impressed with ITWorx excellent onsite adoption program and dedicated team who vigorously enabled our pilot teachers and administrators to master the platform functions," ElGuindi added.

CLG facilitates the management of day-to-day educational activities like content authoring, attendance, exams, and grading. Through AuthorExpert, teachers can create media-enriched learning resources. Through ExamExpert, the platform ensures fast easy assessment process while maintaining security and credibility. Additionally, with AttendanceExpert add-on product, teachers manage to record and monitor attendance with minimal effort, enter absence reasons, and add any other explanatory comments.

ITWorx is a Microsoft Gold Certified and Strategic Education Partner specialised in providing K12 solutions to ministries of education, local counties, and private schools and academic institutions to help realise their e-learning vision. K12 institutions selecting ITWorx education offerings include Durham County Council schools, Kent County Council, and Twynham school in UK, AL-Ghad Schools in UAE, and Coram Deo Academy in USA.

About Maarif:
Maarif is the largest K-12 private education institution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It serves more than 22,000 students in its Arabic and International schools spread across all major geographic regions in the country.

About ITWorx:
ITWorx is a global software professional services organization serving Governments, Educational institutions, Telecommunication operators, Financial Services firms, and Media organizations in North America, Europe, and the Middle East through a myriad of services, including Portals, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Application Integration, Advanced Infrastructure Services, Application Development Outsourcing, Quality Assurance, Security, and Support. For more information, visit http://www.itworx.com.

For more information on ITWorx please contact:
Dalia Kamel
Senior Marketing Executive
pr@itworx.com
T: +20 2 2673 6121
F: +20 2 2276 6188
ITWorx
http://www.itworx.com