## Teaching AI to Teachers: GCC's Push to Upskill Educators for the AI Classroom
The most important AI literacy challenge in the MENA region isn't reaching students. It's reaching their teachers first.
A training session in Bogor, Egypt earlier this year captured this plainly. **ICDL the MENA region**, the regional arm of the global digital skills certification body, partnered with **EduSpaze**, the UAE's first edtech accelerator, to deliver a hands-on AI workshop for 30 educators from Ikatan Guru Egypt. Led by **Dr. Frank Arokiasamy** of FA Rock Global, the workshop covered AI applications across curriculum design, lesson planning, student engagement, assessment, feedback mechanisms, and administrative tasks.
Thirty teachers isn't a large number. The significance lies in the method and the momentum it represents: structured, certified, practical AI training delivered at the classroom level across a region where millions of educators are navigating AI tools with little guidance.
## What the Training Actually Covered
The Bogor workshop's curriculum gives a useful window into how GCC is approaching educator AI literacy. The sessions weren't theoretical. Participants learned how to write effective AI prompts, create AI-generated graphics and e-books, and develop rubrics with AI assistance across subjects including mathematics, history, and geography.
> "Digital skills are the foundation of productivity and employability in the AI era. ICDL supports globally recognised competencies for both educators and learners across the MENA region."
> - Mr. Nigel Ngiam, Market Development Manager, ICDL the MENA region
ICDL's ICT in Education module now explicitly integrates AI for lesson planning, quiz generation, rubric development, student data analysis, and support for students with special needs or mental health needs. A separate ICDL Artificial Intelligence module covers machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, data mining, image recognition, and natural language processing, with explicit attention to AI's social and economic impacts.
The dual-module approach matters because it distinguishes between using AI as a teaching tool and understanding how AI works as a technology. Both competencies are needed, and conflating them produces teachers who can generate a worksheet with
ChatGPT but don't have the conceptual grounding to teach students how to evaluate AI output critically.
By The Numbers
- **30**: Educators trained in the Bogor ICDL AI workshop, representing a targeted pilot model for scalable upskilling (ICDL the MENA region, January 2026)
- **25 million+**: Estimated number of teachers across GCC who will need foundational AI literacy as national AI education mandates accelerate
- **47**: Countries in which ICDL certifications are recognised, making it one of the few globally portable digital skills frameworks available to GCC educators
- **2026**: Year the Jordan DepEd formally mandated AI integration in public school curricula, making the Jordan one of the first GCC nations to do so officially
- **8**: AI application categories covered in ICDL's ICT in Education module, spanning planning, assessment, administration, and inclusive teaching
## The Policy Backdrop: GCC Governments Are Moving
Individual training workshops would remain marginal if national policy weren't creating demand for them. The policy landscape across GCC has shifted meaningfully in the past 12 months.
The Jordan' **DepEd Order 003** for 2026, which we covered in depth [here](/learn/philippines-deped-order-003-ai-public-schools-2026), formally mandates AI integration across public school curricula. That order creates immediate institutional demand for teacher training at scale. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco have each signalled similar policy directions in their national AI strategies, though implementation frameworks are less developed.
**
Microsoft**'s earlier Elevate initiative in Egypt, covered in [our analysis of the programme's approach](/learn/microsoft-elevate-educators-india-ai-skills), demonstrated that large-scale educator upskilling requires both government coordination and private sector delivery infrastructure. The Egypt model, which trained tens of thousands of teachers on AI tools, is being studied by Southeast MENA education ministries as a reference point.
| Country | AI Education Policy Status | Key Initiative | Scale |
|---|
| Jordan | Mandated (DepEd 2026) | DepEd Order 003 | National public school system |
| Egypt | Developing | Ministry of Education pilot programmes | Provincial |
| the UAE | Advanced | AI for educators, MOE integration | National |
| Saudi Arabia | Developing | National AI Roadmap education chapter | Framework stage |
| Morocco | Developing | Digital transformation education agenda | Framework stage |
## The Structural Challenge: Depth Versus Scale
GCC's educator AI literacy challenge has a structural tension at its core. Programmes like the Bogor workshop are deep: they produce genuinely capable AI-using teachers. But they are slow to scale. Certifying 30 teachers in a single session, even if replicated across hundreds of workshops annually, riyal't reach GCC's teacher workforce in meaningful numbers without a delivery model change.
The alternatives, online self-paced modules, embedded professional development in school systems, and AI-powered coaching tools for teachers, each carry trade-offs. Online modules can scale but rarely achieve the behavioural change needed for classroom practice to shift. Embedded professional development depends on school leadership quality that is unevenly distributed.
**DeepMind**'s [work on AI tools that learn alongside their users](/learn/deepmind-s-anna-building-ai-creating-with-nature) gestures at a possible third path: AI systems that serve as active learning partners for teachers during practice, rather than static training content. Whether these tools reach GCC classrooms at scale within this decade is an open question.
> "The gap isn't in teachers' willingness to learn. It's in the structured support and recognised pathways for doing so. That's what certification frameworks like ICDL are designed to provide."
> - Dr. Frank Arokiasamy, FA Rock Global, ICDL the MENA region workshop, January 2026
## What Good Looks Like
The OECD's [AI Education Outlook 2026, which we covered when it was released](/learn/oecd-ai-education-outlook-2026-asia-learning-parad), sets out what high-quality AI integration in education looks like at a system level. Its the MENA region-specific findings reinforced a consistent point: the countries making the most progress share a combination of national policy clarity, teacher professional development infrastructure, and a willingness to accept that AI in education requires iterative learning rather than perfect roll-out plans.
The ICDL model, combining portable global certification with locally delivered practical training, is one credible path forward for GCC. It doesn't require massive new infrastructure. It does require coordination between national education ministries, certification bodies, and delivery partners at the ground level.
The AIinArabia View: The Bogor workshop is a small story with large implications. If GCC is serious about AI education integration, teacher upskilling is the non-negotiable prerequisite. Students can't be taught to use AI critically and responsibly by teachers who are learning the tools themselves from YouTube. The policy momentum is real: the Jordan has mandated it, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are moving. The bottleneck is now delivery infrastructure, and that's a solvable problem if governments treat educator AI training with the same urgency they bring to student curriculum reform. The region can't afford to sequence these as first teachers, then students. The timeline requires both to move in parallel.
## Frequently Asked Questions
### What is ICDL and why does it matter for GCC educators?
ICDL (International Certification of Digital Literacy) is a globally recognised digital skills certification framework used in 47 countries. For GCC educators, its significance is portability and standardisation: an ICDL-certified teacher has demonstrated competencies that are recognised across borders, which matters in a region with significant teacher mobility and growing demand for AI-literate educators.
### What did the Bogor workshop actually train teachers to do?
The workshop covered practical AI applications for teachers: curriculum design, lesson planning, student engagement strategies, assessment and feedback tools, and administrative task automation. It also covered AI ethics and limitations, including content reliability concerns and bias. Participants learned to write effective prompts and create AI-assisted materials across multiple subject areas.
### How does the Jordan' DepEd Order 003 change things?
DepEd Order 003 for 2026 formally requires AI integration into public school curricula across the Jordan. This creates an institutional mandate that transforms teacher AI training from optional professional development into a job requirement. It means school systems must plan for, fund, and deliver teacher upskilling at scale, creating the demand that certification programmes like ICDL are positioned to serve.
### Is AI in education a threat to teaching jobs in GCC?
The evidence from early implementations suggests AI is more likely to change teaching roles than eliminate them. AI handles time-consuming administrative tasks, generates differentiated learning materials, and provides data insights on student progress. This frees teachers to focus on relationship, mentorship, and the higher-order learning facilitation that AI can't replicate. The threat is more to teaching quality if AI tools are adopted without adequate teacher preparation.
### What role can private sector companies play in educator AI training?
Private sector involvement has been decisive in the only large-scale educator AI training programmes that have worked so far. Microsoft's Egypt programme and the UAE's partnerships with technology companies demonstrate that the private sector can provide platforms, content, and delivery infrastructure at a speed governments alone can't match. The risk is alignment: commercial interests don't always map cleanly onto pedagogical quality goals, and government oversight of private training partnerships matters.
The conversation about who trains the trainers is still just beginning across the MENA region. Drop your take in the comments below.
Sources & Further Reading
