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Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 361–372

Language

  • English

Print Length

12 pages

21. Building the Knowledge Bank from Scratch

Interview with Mohamed El-Araby

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 361–372)
Mohamed El-Araby, web developer and coordinator of the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), describes working with a team of engineers to build the platform from scratch. He explains its general architecture, and how they developed special features for teachers and students in Kindergarten through Grade 12. He manages the project’s relationship with the publishers who provide the content, and the partnership with the national Center for Curriculum and Instructional Materials Development (CCIMD) to ensure educational materials are properly sorted to match specific subjects and lessons. During the COVID-19 pandemic when the country had to make a quick pivot to online learning, the EKB assumed the additional function of serving as the nation’s learning management system which required around the clock solutions. As a perpetual work in progress, he stresses the importance of constantly improving the systems.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).