Al Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC) has inked an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) that will provide online learning opportunities to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children across the Middle East.

The new initiative will involve the use of the educational website Taalam.TV, launched by Al Jazeera Children’s Channel in January 2010, across UNRWA schools in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Taalam.TV, the first educational VOD online platform in the Arab World, was designed in collaboration with a group of Arab teachers and educational experts and has a database of educational audiovisual materials extracted from JCC TV content along with curricula-based supporting documents.

The agreement also ushers in a long-term partnership, under which JCC would provide UNRWA and the young Palestinian students with special online educational material in their classrooms.

The deal follows JCC’s signing of a MoU with the Sultanate of Oman’s Ministry of Education in April 2010 granting schools access to its educational website. Taalam.TV is currently in use by more than 100,000 students in 178 schools across 28 countries including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Syria, France, Britain, USA and Canada.