Q8Ba7th Official Blog

The Ministry of Education in Kuwait have released electronic versions of the Kuwait public school course materials and made available for download from their website as PDF files.

I’m not sure if this includes all of the material, as I saw some First Episode books without the second, but it’s still a very good move for both students and teachers, to gain easy and quick access to the material, even if it’s late on print (like always!).

Now the real bad thing about it is how they decided to split it into chapters, and you will have to download each chapter separately.

I wonder why, as the size is really just a few MBs and bandwidth is less of an issue now. Worst case is allow for chapter or full book download. So if you really want it as a single document, follow the two simple steps:

1. Download all PDF files manually, or I suggest you use DownThemAll add-on for Firefox to retrieve all the relevant PDF files. Put them all in one directory.
2. Use MergePDF.net or else the steps described here to merge all the files in one. Make sure to keep them in the right order though.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Name: Q8Tutors.com

Business Type: Education

Languages: Arabic

Launch Date: March, 2009 (Beta)

Brief:
Q8Tutors.com is new idea in Kuwait for private tutors listing, still in Beta stage. The site has a design of it’s simplest form, and a very direct tutor search feature covering all education level from elementary school to Bachelors and Masters. You can filter by tutor gender, subject (which still needs to have more varieties), and educational level.

Tutors can also freely advertise and list their services for FREE and on the fly. People searching will not be able to see the name but only details and contact info.

The site is still fairly new and not fully occupied yet, but with time I guess it’s gonna be a big traffic with our classified ad newspapers full of such paid advertisements that are hard to find and filter. An advantage of having the listings online however would be more information about the tutor, like pricing, and the review of students who hired him/her. That would really give a great value for the student, as it’s one thing to find a tutor, and it’s a completely different thing to find a good tutor. This is what’s missing from the classified ads.

Ofcourse, one could also argue about the ethics of teachers giving private lessons, but that’s up to the single individual I guess.

Snapshot:

Popularity: 26% [?]

As the college opening approaches, you are probably asking about the professors you have picked. Are they good/bad/easy? Can I get an A! Lots of people ask that question as if it’s all on the professor . Anyways, KUNIV.net is a nice unique site in Kuwait for Kuwait University Professor’s reviews. The idea is very simple. You login, and review your professor. You have to fill in the information about which class you took with him, which grade you got. So an F student review would not matter a lot perhaps to the reader. The site reads 8850 reviews at time of writing over 1247 professors. I’m not sure is 1247 is the number of reviewed professors or total of all professors. All in all, you will find your professor review most of the time.

I should add a note here however I could not agree to half the reviews on my department, so you should not only take the rating. Please take the time to go through the review it self. For example, you will see that professors that give easy A’s and high grades get the credit back with 5 stars. Some students however take the definition of university literally as a place to learn and do not care only about the grade (I happen to be one of them!). In that case, you will be disappointed with the result.

What I dislike about the site is being forced to register to read the review. It’s a bit awkward to have that restriction on just reading. It seems like a way to push for more registered users. But what good is a registered user if he doesn’t intend to contribute in content? Just let him read the review I’d say.

This site, you should know, is only for Kuwait University. There is another version of it for GUST University, and another for the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training. Both are still kind of new and don’t have strong community as it seems.

Popularity: 12% [?]