In comparison to other communities, the level of education in the Arab community is on the rise in past years. As the Arab community strives to break barriers and achieve celebrated accomplishments, we can see nowadays more and more people from the Arab world holding key positions across various industries.
Despite all the success, there is still a clear gap between those who have succeeded, to those still aspiring to get there. Platforms that attempt to bridge this educational gap have been mostly unsuccessful in finding the right solution so far. But that’s not true for all of them. While searching for platforms that are able to bridge the gap, we notice the upcoming trend of remote learning, especially during the COVID-19 crisis. Like mushrooms after a spring rain, we see more and more companies offering a variety of remote learning packages, popping up everywhere.
When glancing over the different companies in Israel and around the world, we notice a missing language in the remote learning scene. It’s pretty obvious that the spotlight shines bright on the American dream, its professors, its language, and its teaching methods. All around the world, we see the American dream being imitated in one way or another, from the unique teaching methods to using different languages in an effort to make it more accessible. However, even here, we see one language which is being left out - the Arabic language.
Over the past two months, a change has taken place with a new startup called YALLA ACADEMY entering the ring. With extensive activity, experienced faculty, and devoted students, you would think that this startup has been around for years, however, it exists for only a couple of months and that, more than anything, testifies to large demand and yearning coming from the Arab world.
YALLA ACADEMY uses key figures and executives from the Arab world as lecturers to run online courses and share with students their knowledge from their extensive and rich experience. While scrolling through YALLA ACADEMY’s website, the first thing you’ll notice is that there is absolutely no English or Hebrew, or any other language to be exact, except Arabic. Therefore, if you don’t read or write in the language then you are in for a pretty confusing ride. So, to further gain insight into the website’s activities we brought in an Arabic speaking friend to help us out, and we were surprised to find that the online lectures were just a part of a whole world of content.
Every two weeks, YALLA ACADEMY holds a free event open to the public that centers around a lecture from one of the academy’s partnered businessmen or lecturers. When we joined the open event we were surprised to find dozens of other people thirsty for every word coming out of the lecturer’s mouth, causing the event to last an extra hour following an extensive Q&A round at the end.
After we were exposed to the various and diverse courses that the startup offers, our attention was then caught once again when noticing the YALLA ACADEMY community. We took one of that startups’ lecturers to a quick conversation, asking him about this special community. “It’s an open forum where current and former students can connect with lecturers and industry experts to further develop ideas and ask any questions they desire”, he explains. One of the students told us that it’s an amazing first-of-its-kind Arabic-speaking networking platform for Arab entrepreneurs and students to better connect with various industry leaders and gain valuable insight into the path to success.
YALLA ACADEMY told Geektime that in light of the success of the program in the local Israeli arena and with the increasing demand for the next quarter - it intends to open the program in the European market in order to create a global Arabic-speaking community that will provide practical content from key business figures in the global Arab world.
Written by Ella Mansour
