Ministry of Education: Delivering digital learning to 4.8 million students across Malaysia
About Ministry of Education
Malaysia’s Ministry of Education (MOE) is responsible for providing a comprehensive and rigorous education to 4.8 million students at 10,000-plus schools from primary to the end of secondary education. MOE aims to provide equitable access to quality digital learning resources to all students across Malaysia.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Matrix Connexion and Awantec Systems
About Matrix Connexion
Matrix Connexion (MatrixC) provides cloud solutions, support, and training services to help businesses achieve their fullest potential using technology that is most suited to them. The Google Cloud and Google Workspace partner has offices in Malaysia and Thailand.
About Awantec Systems
Awantec Systems focuses on the development and delivery of cloud-based systems, enabling business transformation through cloud-based services, real-time insights and analytics.
With Google Cloud, Google Workspace and Classroom, the Ministry of Education is providing access to digital resources and services to 4.8 million students across Malaysia and engaging 98% of teachers with its digital learning platform.
Google Cloud results
- Supports spike of 200,000 reports created by teachers to manage pandemic in schools
- Enables collection of student digital learning usage data across 10,000-plus schools to identify areas for correction
- Expands use of the MOE digital learning platform and resources to 98% of teachers
Supported a peak of 4.3 million logins to the platform
Improving education standards is crucial to Malaysia’s ambitions to become a high-income country that realizes its human potential, according to the World Bank. Malaysia’s school system educates 4.8 million students every year across primary, lower secondary and higher secondary levels, to matriculation colleges, with more than 480,000 teachers across 10,230 institutions nationwide. Overseeing this is the Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOE), which is responsible for ensuring that the education students receive in the country are to the highest of standards.
When the Covid-19 lockdown happened in 2020 resulting in school closures, MOE launched its Digital Education Learning Initiative Malaysia (DELIMa), which saw the Ministry participating with key technology stakeholders including Google Cloud, and international development partner UNICEF, to ensure learning continuity.
Wagheeh Shukry Hassan, Deputy Director of the Educational Resources and Technology Division at the Ministry of Education, stated that the Covid-19 pandemic "accelerated the use of technology in education." The goal was to transform and enhance education for the future, blending face-to-face and online learning for both students and teachers. This is in line with the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB) 2013-2025, which includes a modernization strategy that the Ministry had set out to achieve, democratizing learning by equipping teachers and students with digital skills for lifelong learning.
Establishing a new instance for millions of students in weeks
Shukry explains that there are three key tenets to DELIMa, namely platform democratization, lifelong learning, followed by a complete digital transformation. By December 2020, the initiative had expanded to include 3.4 million students and 436,000 teachers.
"The first step was to build a learning platform with a full suite of applications, services and content, the second, to deliver a seamless experience for teachers, students and other stakeholders, which means integrating as many applications and services as possible, and the third, is to adopt a single identity so users do not have to work with multiple logins," says Azhan bin Abdullah, Director of Information Technology, Education Performance and Delivery Unit (PADU) at MOE.
As a priority, the ministry wanted to personalize students’ and teachers’ experiences of the platform and ensure users could access digital content and email and storage services regardless of location. To do so, some schools independently funded and provided access to online services, using internal expertise or engaging third-party businesses. However, many of these institutions were working in silos, and the Ministry found Google Workspace, under the Google Workspace for Education license to be the most compatible platform for seamless logins and personalized accounts. "We had issues delivering accessibility, and this kickstarted our search into cloud platforms and services," explains Azhan.
With tools like Gmail and Drive, Google Workspace enabled every teacher and student in Malaysia to own their dedicated email, storage and access to cloud applications via appropriate modes. The ease of deployment and seamless integration of single sign-on with Google Workspace applications enabled the organization to set up new instances quickly.
Shukry shares that connectivity and access to devices are acknowledged challenges that the Ministry is actively working to resolve, as institutions in rural locations particularly, face infrastructure challenges. In these areas, students and teachers may need to find different alternatives to access the platform, such as accessing devices via school labs or borrowing their parents' devices to access learning content. There are also device projects done by the government prioritizing underprivileged students. As part of the digital learning ecosystem and learning continuity, every student is assigned a single digital identity at the beginning of primary school that remains with them until the end of secondary school.
"Teachers used Google Workspace from their desktops and mobile to communicate with students and share teaching material, to track student scores and prepare and schedule tasks and assignments. Students were also able to upload assignments automatically to be assessed by their teachers, and submit pictures of homework completed on paper," shares Azhan.
"Teachers used Google Workspace from their desktops and mobile to communicate with students and share teaching material, to track student scores and prepare and schedule tasks and assignments."
—Azhan Bin Abdullah, Director of Information Technology, Education Performance and Delivery Unit, Ministry of EducationGrowing the capabilities of DELIMa with BigQuery
Being a nationwide project, the team behind DELIMa would carry out regular reviews with teachers to ensure the solutions implemented were supporting on-ground efforts. "We truly believe that digital learning is the new currency. The positive feedback we received from teachers gave us the confidence to move beyond Google Workspace, to further support the learning ecosystem leveraging Google Cloud tools," shares Shukry.
As next steps, MOE’s IT team contacted Google Cloud to explore its other products according to the different use-cases. The IT team also promoted the solution internally by giving decision-makers case studies and other materials that covered cloud and new technologies.
Soon, MOE deployed an analytics data warehouse on BigQuery, with Looker Studio providing interactive dashboards and reporting of metrics such as the number of students in individual schools with literacy and numeracy issues.
"With BigQuery, Looker Studio and Google Workspace applications such as Sheets, we have democratized reporting and accountability across the education system in Malaysia," says Azhan. "We can create reports and dashboards within the MOE, and we now see teachers, schools and state and district education departments doing the same thing."
"With BigQuery, Looker Studio and Google Workspace applications such as Sheets, we have democratized reporting and accountability across the education system in Malaysia."
—Azhan Bin Abdullah, Director of Information Technology, Education Performance and Delivery Unit, Ministry of EducationCreating analytics reports to track coronavirus cases
As teachers got accustomed to creating dashboards to track learning progress and trends, they started to improvise, leveraging the powerful capability of BigQuery to track and enhance their reporting.
For example, at the peak of the pandemic, teachers would track students showing symptoms of infection in their reporting, enabling schools and departments to more effectively implement measures to limit its spread. "We were surprised by how quickly our teachers seized the opportunities these tools provided as we were still training them to use their capabilities," says Azhan. "At one point we saw a spike in reports created in Looker Studio as teachers and schools worked to keep students healthy."
Post-pandemic, teachers are using dashboards for initiatives such as tracking overall class performance through virtual report cards for individual students that may be shared with parents. This helps teachers identify any areas that need corrective action, such as more time spent on individual learning topics, to deliver improvements.
The platform design of DELIMa enables data collection across its more than 10,000 schools, and in 2022, the organization undertook a 20-day data collection exercise to help identify any locations that required intervention to improve students’ literacy and numeracy.
Working with partners to expand the use of cloud in education
Throughout its implementation of Google Cloud, MOE worked with Matrix Connexion (MatrixC) for expert support to the analytics deployment. Both teams are now working with Awantec Systems to set up advanced mobile device management (MDM), where the Ministry would be able monitor and manage the capacity and capability of schools in their digital learning environment through data on dashboards.
This project includes monitoring BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and school computer lab devices to track usage and obtain fine-grained detail of what students and teachers were using and how. The organization has now extended visibility to all schools nationwide to understand their capacity to meet educational objectives.
“We truly believe that digital learning is the new currency. The positive feedback we received from teachers gave us the confidence to move beyond Google Workspace, to further support the learning ecosystem leveraging Google Cloud tools.”
—Wagheeh Shukry Hassan, Deputy Director of the Educational Resources and Technology Division, Ministry of EducationEquipping the nation for a seamless learning environment
Three years since the launch of DELIMa, MOE is now tracking a range of metrics to determine the success of DELIMa, including takeup. “We started by tracking logins, which remains our primary metric, then moved to usage and now more fine-grained tracking of usage of various applications and services within the platform by teachers, students and other stakeholders,” says Azhan. He adds that the implementation of BigQuery and MDM has certainly been instrumental in the success of DELIMa, as it has extended the use-cases, with data support to ensure seamless learning experiences across the country.
About 98% of teachers now use Google Cloud for various tasks. With Google Classroom, Google Workspace and Google Cloud, MOE is now well positioned to achieve its objective of providing equitable access to quality digital learning resources for all students, regardless of location or background. “With Google Cloud, we are enhancing students’ digital literacy and skills to enable them to become global citizens and active participants in the digital economy,” concludes Azhan.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Ministry of Education
Malaysia’s Ministry of Education (MOE) is responsible for providing a comprehensive and rigorous education to 4.8 million students at 10,000-plus schools from primary to the end of secondary education. MOE aims to provide equitable access to quality digital learning resources to all students across Malaysia.
About Matrix Connexion and Awantec Systems
About Matrix Connexion
Matrix Connexion (MatrixC) provides cloud solutions, support, and training services to help businesses achieve their fullest potential using technology that is most suited to them. The Google Cloud and Google Workspace partner has offices in Malaysia and Thailand.
About Awantec Systems
Awantec Systems focuses on the development and delivery of cloud-based systems, enabling business transformation through cloud-based services, real-time insights and analytics.