AlJazeera.net was not the average news site, but rather gained dis- tinction and leadership by frequenting new spaces that went beyond typical media activities to varied fields, including education, training and culture. At the end of 2013, http://learning.aljazeera.net was estab- lished with two interfaces for teaching Arabic, one of which was Ara- bic-French and the other, Arabic-English, with most of the educational content based on reading, audio and visual materials produced by Al Jazeera. In 2017, a third Arabic-Turkish interface was added, giving non-native speakers three ways to learn Arabic from a large source of educational services and tools. Another feature of this initiative was providing educational portals with new names, such as “Media Lan- guage”, using written, audio-visual and “general language” materials produced internally by Al Jazeera or in cooperation with universities and educational institutions. Moreover, there was the “Our Commu- nity” feature attached to this initiative, which enabled users to directly contribute to preparing site materials via the “You Teach” feature, a blog or even the unique “Ask a Teacher” feature. The third feature was “Test Your Level”, which allowed users to choose the level most suit- able to them. More recently, an additional portal was added, “Al Jazeera Ency- clopaedia”, an unprecedented feature in its comprehensiveness, provid- ing information on everything relevant to the news world according to a complex and accurate classification system. This encyclopaedia was launched on 1 January 2015 after years of preparation, and presented the news narrative in an easy to navigate format. It includes country descriptions and important people, organisations, events and commonly used terms, becoming the first of its kind and size in Arabic. To further benefit users, the written text is enhanced with audio-visual materials and infographics, and includes hyperlinks to other related topics in the encyclopaedia. These projects transformed AlJazeera.net to a massive digital repository of information and an extensive gateway to knowl- edge, used by a variety of people, including journalists, researchers, academics and others. In yet another innovative media step, and in line with the digital environment’s transformations, including the prevalence of blogs in the Arab region after the Arab Spring revolutions, AlJazeera.net launched
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