Find our how one of the leading higher education institutions in Egypt harnessed the power of adaptive learning to personalize the learning experience and improved student outcomes.
student accounts created on Connect®
modules of the faculty of business are currently using Connect®
The British University in Egypt (BUE) is an Egyptian not-for-profit private university, founded under Egyptian law. Its vision is to offer a British ethos of higher education with a range of UK partners and other global partners providing internationally recognised quality degrees that develop the knowledge and skills to help our students shape and lead their countries.
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Primary Contact: Dr Wafaa Salah
Department: Faculty of Business Administration, Economics, and Political Science
Products Used: McGraw Hill Connect
Dr Wafaa is an accounting associate professor in the Faculty of Business Administration, Economics, and Political Science at the British University in Egypt. She is the faculty interactive system coordinator. Ahead of using Connect as an integral part of the courses she organised, Dr Wafaa faced a number of challenges.
Dr Wafaa highlighted that her students were not committed to the readings they were being assigned. Additionally, she shared that the two- hour lecture windows were problematic. “It’s hard for students to concentrate for that long,” she said.
Dr Wafaa would spend a lot of time creating questions to use in quizzes herself. This was an activity that took up a lot of time. “No-one wants to spend their time doing this,” she said.
“My course is really hard, and I didn’t always know if all my students were understanding fully,” said Dr Wafaa. She expanded this point saying, “Some of the learners may not understand all the concepts in the module clearly. The course relies on those concepts being understood, so without them, students can really struggle to grasp the content.” It was an email with an offer that kickstarted the shift to digital at BUE. The BUE eLearning Director, Professor Khaled Nagaty, wrote to faculty at the university asking them if they would like to try their modules in an interactive format. “It was new to me to hear this concept,” Dr Wafaa said.
In order to get both staff and students up-to-speed with Connect, the McGraw Hill Learning Consultant for the university put on “a lot of training. We did more than 100 training sessions with McGraw Hill for the module leaders and we train staff members before the beginning of each semester,” Dr Wafaa shared, commenting that staff have become comfortable with the technology on account of this.
10% to 20% of the student’s coursework is now allocated to assignments in Connect. “By giving students marks for their work in Connect, we were able to ensure students were doing it,” Dr Wafaa said. “We know students will be students but once we introduced this method, we saw them begin to study regularly.”
Reading is set ahead of time and face-to-face time is now spent discussing concepts and looking at case studies to increase the level of understanding. After the class, Connect is used for summative assessment and enables Dr Wafaa to see how the students are faring.
Dr Wafaa pointed to a range of features within Connect that she has found beneficial.
Tegrity is McGraw Hill’s video capture solution in Connect that can be used in traditional, flipped, hybrid, or fully online courses. For Dr Wafaa, the capacity to record her lectures and upload to Connect was a “major” benefit. “It’s a very powerful tool and it was brilliant for some students who need more support as they could return back to the video and listen again when they needed to.”
Dr Wafaa shared an anecdote to highlight how useful Tegrity has been. “I had one student who didn’t appear to be engaged or concentrating in our time together. One day, I saw he had got a C grade. I was surprised, so I went and asked him about it. He told me that he only understood parts of the lectures, but when he listened again through Tegrity, he was able to grasp it. He tried hard to get that mark, but he wouldn’t have been able to do that without the lecture recordings.”
The algorithmic questions were also highlighted as important for Dr Wafaa. These show different questions to different learners and can help in preventing assessment issues.
Additionally, the reporting tools in Connect were cited by Dr Wafaa as very useful. She shared that, on occasion, learners would tell her they had internet connectivity issues when they were working on their online exams. “After the exam finished, we would hear that they weren’t able to access the system for 15 minutes. When we went to the reports available in Connect, we could see from the reports the total time spent within the exam environment so we were able to detect who was telling the truth and who wasn’t.”
The reporting is also useful for checking students’ understanding of concepts. Dr Wafaa will check each week to see how they have understood the topics and will adjust her time with her learners to address any gaps in knowledge based on what the reports tell her. “The reports also help me to identify at risk student,” she said.
Dr Wafaa has been closely analysing the impact of the move to digital learning at the faculty of Business Administration in the British University. The chart in the next column shows the final course grades over a three-year window for one accounting module, with the earlier two years representing time without Connect.
Dr Wafaa contextualised the results saying, “The failure rate in both 2015 and 2016 was 29% and you can also see the percentage of students getting the top marks was fairly consistent.”
What was also interesting was that Dr Wafaa had not adjusted the format or level of the assessments used for her module. “I used the same level of exam across these years,” she said.
As a consequence, she decided to make her assessments a little harder the following year. The graph below shows the results.
Despite making the assessment more rigorous, Dr Wafaa still found that the failure rate declined. “It became a little harder for learners to get the top grades once I made the exam harder so I saw an increase in those students receiving a B grade, but still we saw fewer students getting the lowest marks,” she said.
Dr Wafaa explained that on the back of the success with this module, other colleagues started to follow suit both in terms of structure and the use of Connect. The modules that shifted to Connect also saw their failure rates decrease and an uplift in ‘A’ grades awarded.
After the success in these, she shared that the university decided to utilise Connect for further modules, and have moved many away from other providers because of the success with McGraw Hill.
Dr Wafaa was keen to flag the support McGraw Hill had provided BUE during the pandemic. She said that she considered them fortunate as they were already “using a powerful course management system” but the heavy and continuous support from McGraw Hill was noted to be of much value.
“If we were hit with another pandemic, we would be fine. We were already fine for it because we had everything in place since 2017.” ~ Dr Wafaa
Dr Wafaa highlighted that at least 60% of the modules of the faculty of Business Administration, Economics, and Political Science (BAEPS) are now using McGraw Hill’s Connect. She believes that the success in using this technology has depended on two factors. “The first is the support of the management of the faculty of business and its vision which is derived from the university vision. The dean, vice dean, and the HODs have assigned grades on the activities and quizzes assigned to the students on Connect. Our senior leadership team request annual reports to monitor the progress of using the system, the satisfaction of the students, and the satisfaction of the staff members,” she explained.
The second factor is the continuous training and support to the staff members. “McGraw Hill provided a lot of training and continuous support to the staff members which guarantees the ease of use of the system. These two factors complement each other and if any of them are missed, the success in the transformation will be impossible.”
With both elements working at her university, Dr Wafaa is pleased with the way her learners are supported. “A lot of the students used to forge partnerships with personal tutors for this course so they could pass it. Now I notice that they don’t need that; Connect is like their own personal tutor!”
The move to Connect has also had a benefit on her teaching. “I have become stronger with Connect. I can reach more students,” she said.
Asked for the biggest reason she would recommend Connect, Dr Wafaa highlighted a further area: its simplicity. “We do use other platforms here at BUE but Connect is so simple to use. It is easy to use and clear. You don’t find things you won’t need. The high functionality makes it gold, and it’s why we have shifted most of our modules to McGraw Hill!”
Start your journey towards digital transformation. Tell us a bit about yourself and lets get started.