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Rabat – Over the past three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts believe there is a growing need for better integration of technology in Moroccan schools amidst a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
While the country has made significant strides towards the integration of technology in Morocco’s education system, many believe the country still has a long way to go in terms of realizing its full potential for modernization in this field.
A report released by the Moroccan government in 2019 entitled “The Framework Law” n°51-17 expressed the government’s goals of ‘improving the quality of teaching and training, developing the necessary tools and means to do so, especially through increasing the use of modern education technology, […]’. However, a subsequent joint 2021 report by the Moroccan Supreme Council for Education and UNICEF revealed a myriad of factors interfering with the implementation of this initiative.
The report suggests that teachers with less than five years of experience showed higher technological proficiency compared to their older peers, with many teachers lacking the continuous education needed to keep up with the latest technology.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, the report shows dedicated educational platforms were predominantly ignored in favor of social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Youtube—only 8.4% compared to 69%, respectively.
Post-Covid, digitization in public universities and schools still leaves a lot to be desired. Most institutions are not equipped with Wi-Fi and often have non-functioning networks, in addition to a general lack of technological infrastructure, especially in rural areas.
Professor Naima El Maghnouji of the King Fahd School of Translation in Tangier expressed her views on the matter and stressed the importance of using AI as a tool to improve learning.
“Although the old generation is still resisting the use of AI because of a lack of enough competence and skill, I think professors must be open to learning and acquiring some skills in order to improve accessibility, time-saving, and efficiency,” she told Morocco World News (MWN).
El Maghnouji’s personal experience with incorporating technology in the classroom was at the beginning of COVID-19 in 2020, when she quickly had to incorporate Google Classrooms and online lecturing into her lesson plans for her students at Mohammed V University in Rabat.
“The Google platform was very useful in making online assessments and evaluations by creating automated assessment tasks for the students, which are accessible and submitted online,” says El Maghnouji.
Despite the general lack of technology used in education by teachers and professors, evidence suggests that students will use whatever tools are at their disposal. This was the case even before the pandemic. Nowadays, with the boom in popularity of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the question is not if but how these new technologies will be used.
ChatGPT and AI use in Moroccan universities
For those who don’t know, Chat GPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, an open-source artificial intelligence program that can generate human-like speech through prompts, similar to a regular text conversation you could have with a human being online.
ChatGPT was released to the public on November 30, 2022, and its popularity shot up in 2023, It is used for multiple tasks, such as translation and writing code, and can even provide students with last-minute essays to submit right before their deadline.
Some middle and high schools in cities like New York and Seattle, USA, quickly caught up to their students using this tool to cheat on their exams and assignments and started implementing strict bans on the use of ChatGPT on their networks. Ironically, asking ChatGPT how to bypass these bans provides students plenty of ways around them.
In US universities, professors started designing new courses with AI in mind, mandating students to do more oral exams to prove that their work is original.
Although the general public’s opinion seems unsupportive of the use of AI in education, universities around the world are thinking of ways to implement it in their programs in a healthy and constructive way.
In Morocco, there is not much talk about AI in education at the official level yet, though university professors are noticing its use more and more by their students.
Professor El Maghnouji concludes that the use of AI in education has become necessary “to keep up with the innovation achieved in the field of pedagogy and teaching material […]”.
Though she stresses that caution surrounding the misuse of AI is still essential, especially when it comes to the use of genuine and creative academic research.
