Israelis design Bulgarian remote educational system amid coronavirus
The system was developed to integrate studies through the Education Ministry for over 800,000 students using a Google-based unified system.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFJosh Shoham and Rami Nahum, founders of AppGreat.(photo credit: APPGREAT)
Israeli hi-tech entrepreneurs based in Sofia, Bulgaria, have designed an online platform so that Bulgarian students may go back to school this winter amid the coronavirus pandemic.The system was developed to integrate studies through the Education Ministry for over 800,000 students using a Google-based unified system.The creation of users and data migration for the online system accounted for Google's largest data transfer of the year, with the number of teachers, students and classroom combinations being well over five billion."Google couldn’t believe the challenging timelines for a project in this magnitude, but we did it the Israeli way: by being a bit pushy, a bit rude but ultimately getting the job done – like we do in our other e-commerce, mobile and web development projects that we do in AppGreat," said Israeli tech executive Josh Shoham.Shoham and Rami Nahum, two Israeli founders of AppGreat, also compiled a comprehensive guidance program for the 100,000 teachers and teaching staff across the 4,700 Bulgarian educational institutions, in case one runs into any trouble.The guidance includes tools for lesson management, such as pre-muting students to prevent interference, electronic voting and an online board to replace the chalkboard in the physical classroom, as well as quizzing tools to receive answers from students.Emphasis was put on making the digital tools accessible and easy to use, despite previous knowledge of computers or technology."The most important and challenging part of the preparation and system integration was preparing our staff for training the teachers, so we did it in ‘Mamram’ style of training the trainers," Shoham said. Mamram is the Hebrew acronym for the IDF's Center of Computing and Information Systems.Nahum added: "We hired local teachers with technological orientation as our training staff, and trained them to obtain the Google tools certification. Once certified, we scheduled training sessions with the Education Ministry staff members such as school directors and teachers, in order to cover over 100,000 members of the Bulgarian education system – all in an effort to meet the challenging timelines."A teacher who completed the guidance program said that "the training program helped the education system to quickly adapt and build a planned course of action for emergency circumstances – not just for Covid-19, but also for other force majeure situations such as additional lockdowns and even unplanned summer vacations."
