The Middle East and Africa Association of Test Publishers (MEA-ATP) held their inaugural conference entitled “Education Technology in the Middle East and North Africa: Unlocking Student Potential,” in Abu Dhabi on January 28-30. As a gold sponsor, Hogan sent now-former CEO Scott Gregory, Senior Consultant Darin Nei, and Director of Asia Pacific Business Development, Krista Pederson to attend and present on various topics along with several of Hogan’s distributors in the region, including Career Connections in Kenya, Mentis in the UAE, UK, and Thailand, Baltas in Turkey, and JvR Africa in South Africa.

Scooping up the first speaking session of the day, Scott and Krista presented Hogan’s take on using personality to assess General Employability, while Madeleine Dunford of Career Connections, and Andrew Salisbury of Mentis, followed by sharing Hogan case studies.

During the next session, Darin and Scott discussed the merits of Competencies and how Hogan maps them, while Nicola from JvR Africa, and Ekin Capar from Baltas, shared Hogan competencies case studies from South Africa and Saudi Arabia.  Hogan Distributor JvR Africa also made an additional three presentations across the course of the conference.

Some strong themes from the conference included Technology and how to use technology to further advance the assessment market in education and all other fields; General Employability, especially the need to assess student graduates and other entry level employees on this; and Education Assessment, and how to use assessment to promote further development of the field of education. During the conference, Senior Officials from the UAE announced the launch of MESA, the Moral Education Standardised Assessment, becoming the first nation to implement standardized testing for moral education.  

Hogan is a long-time sponsor of the Association of Test Publishers (ATP), supporting various events across the word including the main “Innovations in Testing” conference each year in the US; the E-ATP conference held in Europe each year; and smaller events organized by the Asia-ATP steering board.