About ICLITE

The Interdisciplinary Centennial Lab for Innovative Technology in Education (ICLITE) was initiated as part of an ambitious endeavor to go beyond the confines of academia to the field work where much support is extended to the different education stakeholders.

Among the most pivotal issues in education equality is a concept that is gaining popularity with the introduction of digital technologies with everyone having a right to access quality education. With the use of digital technology and through creating open educational resources and innovative pedagogies, learners in remote areas such as those in Upper Egypt and elsewhere with limited access to the internet and lack of infrastructure, and those in high prestige locations in Cairo who claim to have 4G internet, can all have affordances to quality learning. Educational content can be developed and shared through low-bandwidth and local intranet and servers at low cost. Developing educational material accessible to all learners where content is shared on mobile devices could be well rewarding for those who need it most.

This project is also in line with the 2030 sustainable development goals with an emphasis on SDG4 that aims to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” It is also aligned with the Egyptian Ministry of Education and Technical Education’s (MOETE) newly developed educational initiative ‘Education 2.0’. The main vision of the new system is to provide access to education for all while bringing the initiative inline with international standards to develop passionate and innovative learners. The use of information and communication technology (ICT) will be utilised more often in teaching and learning especially with high school students. Equity and inclusion are also key components of the new strategy, where social and economic background will not hinder access to quality education.

As part of this project a strong endeavor capacity development was initiated amongst researchers, teachers, graduate students, curricula developers and instructional designers in multiple-disciplines. This was done through different workshops, iterations, STEAM curriculum design, capacity building, and initial piloting in a school setting to see how far the teachers in these schools see and react to the curriculum being built. The curriculum developers, who were alumni of and students at the Graduate School of Education, currently the Department of Educational Studies (DES) had a series of workshops focusing on interdisciplinary STEAM education and how to develop curricula for STEAM.

The developed curricula units were developed with a conceptual framework that brings together STEAM education side by side with Digital literacy (DL). This integration introduces a new concept to the literature known as STEALM.

The project intends to take the developed curricula materials and through the support of professional instructional designers turn them into state-of-the-art instructional materials/content to be stored and disseminated online to the whole of Egypt and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region. Because they are not necessarily subject matter specific and are cross-cutting multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and sometimes transdisciplinary instructional materials, they can be scaled up quite easily and mainstreamed in different settings to accommodate various needs and contextual requirements within and across countries in MENA region to cater for the main concepts of equity and inclusion goals advocated by international organizations.