BCG joins with Riyadh Schools to implement 21st century digital classroom

In the past year, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm and the world’s leading adviser on business strategy, worked with Riyadh Schools, a private K-12 school in Saudi Arabia, to support them in their efforts to adopt an e-learning educational model. Their shared journey toward a digital classroom first began with access to laptops, tablets, interactive white boards, collaborative software and multimedia technologies.
From there, the school’s leadership went on to provide intensive training to help teachers understand how new technologies could be used to expand and enhance their teaching and learning vision — a critical step in an environment where entrenched practices are sometimes difficult to change. In addition, a robust infrastructure was put in place to support these new technologies so that students and teachers alike could trust their connectivity to the Internet.
“Although the program is still very new, it has already produced remarkable results in its first year. More than 30 percent of teachers have already begun using the technology in highly advanced ways,” said Ronald Lake, director general of Riyadh Schools.
“In the first round of assessment, 95 percent of all teachers met the minimum standards for integration of technology into the classroom, and early adopters served as mentors for other teachers, thus functioning as catalysts for change,” he added.
Classrooms around the world are rapidly evolving to keep pace with the technology revolution. Several educational initiatives have demonstrated extremely encouraging results in primary and secondary education, including Rocketship Education, School of One, and the Pearson-Knewton partnership.
“The fact is, the mere presence of computers and state-of-the-art learning-management systems will not improve student achievement,” said Joerg Hildebrandt, a Senior Partner and Managing Director at BCG, and a co-author of the report.
BCG’s report, The Evolution of a Twenty-First Century Digital Classroom, which outlines the program’s accomplishments, has just been released.