By Sarah Dhafir

 

Early 2021, The Station Foundation for Entrepreneurship started a partnership with Coursera funded by the Central Bank of Iraq and the Iraqi Private Bank League. Coursera provided us with 1868 licenses to distribute. licenses are available for one year from the launch date. Which was in early March 2021. 

Since then, licenses have been distributed between students, job seekers, and people who want to level up their skills. A number of licenses were distributed among universities and schools, of those students there were a number of extraordinary students that were remarkable with what they have achieved with the program so far. 

One of said schools was the Iraqi Gifted School, which is the school that has the most brilliant Iraqi students and it has branches all over Iraq. This school's students have achieved some great achievements throughout the program.

 

Hawra Salam Bayan, 9 years old fourth grade student in the Gifted School in Najaf took one of the courses in Psychology (Schizophrenia specialty) and she has learned about the nature of drugs (MRI and fMRI), neurochemistry, scientific and psychological data and theories of perception, emotion and behavior in schizophrenia, and traditional and social psychology.

Hawra has passed the course before graduating fourth grade with a distinction. The talented student obtained an international certificate from Wesleyan University, USA.

It is noteworthy that the student obtained a grade of excellent (100/100), and this course is dedicated to university studies students in the English language. From Coursera international platform:  

 

The success wasn’t only limited to Hawra as there were a number of smart students that were achieving extraordinary things such as:

Malak Adil who has finished the writing personal essays course by Wesleyan university with an excellent grade of (100/100) too.

 

Fatima Alshammary Ahmed has also completed a course of nanotechnology that was provided by Duke university, North Carolina state university, and the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Hamza who also has finished a course titled Artificial intelligence for all provided by Deep learning and AI. And finally, Ammar Yasir who finished 4 Courses on the platform in different topics like the IELTS writing section, public speaking, and time management that were offered by various international universities.

It’s a refreshing and honoring thing to see young, smart, achieving students doing such amazing work on Coursera platform especially when their ages are between 9 to 17 years old!

“Most of our students gained a number of certificates and they are continuing to get the benefits from the platform. A part of the development that we have witnessed in the students is their speaking and email writing skills, they are also working on getting courses in specialized subjects Such as Google and IBM which made an effective influence in their projects.” Said Miss Aseel Ismaiel Ali, specializing in artificial intelligence and Head of Research and Innovation Department at the Authority for the Gifted Students in Iraq.

She also added “The students felt so motivated to see that there are entities that support them and provide them with chances to learn, especially online since we are in the time of Coronavirus pandemic, and the school can’t provide them with summer schools, so these courses were really beneficial for them to learn during the summer.” 

We as The Station are proud to see how the students are getting the full benefit of the Courses provided by this partnership.