Abstract:

Rahhal is an initiative that was launched by the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) in Dubai to provide an innovative alternative to mainstream education in a way that recognizes learning wherever it occurs. Rahhal (which means the traveler in Arabic) is a fully customizable platform that was launched in 2018 as part of 10X, to take Dubai ten years into the future in just two years. Rahhal’s message is: ‘the World is a Classroom and All Learning Counts’ (KHDA, 2019) as it allows students to study at more than on school at a time, study part-time, or study at home. Rahhal was viewed as Dubai’s most ‘disruptive innovation’ in education (Ramzan, 2018). As a result of this flexibility, each student journey becomes unique to their needs and agreed upon between the school and the parents. The guiding research question for this project is: How does Rahhal program promote individualized learning in different schools? The study involved engaging in a phenomenological analysis of ten schools that offered Rahhal program to its students. In-depth face-to-face individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten school leaders and coordinators. The data were analyzed using the constant comparison method through NVivo 12. The findings provided insights that relate to the interpretation of the Rahhal program by the different schools, the shapes of the individualized learning tracks that were crafted by each school, the challenges faced by these schools as they embarked on this journey, and the mechanisms of implementation that enabled for providing these alternative paths within mainstream education schools. The study provides insights and recommendations to schools on creating accredited and well-supported personal learning environments in mainstream schools.

Keywords:

Personalized Learning, Innovation, Rahhal.