HP IDEA. 1.5 million students reached through teacher innovation and AI skills.

HP's flagship global education academy. Launched in the UAE in 2020. Now reaching more than 1.5 million students and 70,000 educators across 35 countries. Verdant designed and led the UAE cohort, and the model that scaled from there.

The problem.

HP set out to build a global education academy that would raise the quality of digital pedagogy in schools. The academy needed to work in schools with very different starting points, be delivered in more than one language, and produce evidence of impact strong enough to justify continued investment. It also needed a delivery model that could scale beyond any one country.

What Verdant did.

Verdant designed and led the UAE cohort, which HP launched in October 2020 with the UAE Ministry of Education's Training and Professional Development Department. The engagement covered five workstreams.

• Teacher innovation and design. Two roles per school. HP IDEA Fellows as instructional leaders, HP IDEA Associates as classroom practitioners. Three to six educators per school across twelve Emirati schools, structured to build both individual craft and school-level capacity.
• Curriculum grounded in research. The programme drew on research from Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of Michigan. Delivered across English and Arabic classrooms and mapped to KHDA and MoE goals.
• Impact analysis. Observation instruments, student work samples, and reflection cycles were built into the delivery cycle rather than added afterwards, so every conference produced evidence teachers used the following month.
• Training at cadence. Four conferences across the year with weekly coursework and structured peer learning between sessions. The rhythm of the programme mattered as much as the content itself.
• AI skills. As HP IDEA evolved into HP's AI Academy, AI skills were built into teacher practice as tools of the trade rather than as content for a separate lesson. Teachers used AI in planning, feedback, and differentiation and took that practice back to their classrooms.

What changed.

The UAE cohort became a reference model that HP scaled globally. HP IDEA's growth from twelve Emirati schools in 2020 to more than 1.5 million students in 35 countries by 2026 rests in part on the delivery structure piloted in the UAE. The programme is delivered in more than ten languages and has reached more than 70,000 educators worldwide.

Why the UAE pilot travelled.

Global programmes generally do not survive translation into local school systems. HP IDEA did, and the reason was structural. The UAE cohort was built as a reference model from the outset, with the delivery rhythm, teacher roles, and evidence loop designed to be portable. Piloting in the UAE gave HP a programme that already worked in two languages, across a diverse school system, and inside a regulator's expectations. Every subsequent country was a replication with local adjustment.

Sources.

HP IDEA launch coverage, UAE, October 2020. HP AI Academy site, 2026. Business Mirror, June 2026, on 35 countries, 70,000 plus educators, and 1.5 million plus students.