Twelve Questions to Ask Any Platform Vendor Selling Into Jordan and the Gulf

International LMS buyer’s guides are written for schools in Manchester and Ohio. They are not wrong, but they are missing about a third of the decision for a school in Amman, Dubai, Riyadh or Doha — and the missing third is where the expensive surprises live. Nobody in a Chicago procurement guide has ever had to ask whether the timetable understands a Sunday start.

This is the regional half of the checklist: twelve questions to put to any platform vendor selling into Jordan and the Gulf, in the order that a school actually discovers them. Use it alongside the general buyer’s guide, not instead of it.

The twelve regional questions

1. Is the interface genuinely bilingual, and where does the Arabic stop?
   Ask to see the Arabic version of the least glamorous screen — a settings page, an error message, a parent email. Products that translated the marketing site and stopped are obvious within one click, and your office staff will find that click on day one.
2. Does it handle a Sunday–Thursday week?
   Not “can it be configured”. Ask them to show you a timetable starting on a Sunday, with your period structure and your bells. This is the single most common place a good international product reveals it has never been sold here.
3. Which exam sessions does the content cover?
   Cambridge and Edexcel run more than one series a year, and schools across the region use November and February–March entries heavily. A question bank that only covers May/June is missing the sessions your resit cohort will actually sit — and November is a real planning cycle here, not an edge case.
4. Does it know both boards, properly?
   Schools in this region frequently run Cambridge in one subject and Edexcel in another, sometimes in the same year group. A platform that treats “IGCSE” as one thing will mark your Edexcel students against the wrong expectations. The boards differ in ways that matter to marking.
5. What does it do about ministry equivalency?
   Equivalency is the paperwork parents ask about, and the rules differ by country — Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt each have their own. No platform handles equivalency for you, but a vendor who has never heard the word has not sold to a school here.
6. Where does the data sit, and who can export it?
   Ask for the hosting location, the export format, and the notice period on the day you leave — in the contract, not the sales email. Data protection expectations across the region are tightening; a vendor who cannot answer where your students’ data lives has not thought about it.
7. Who answers support, and in which timezone?
   A ticket raised at 9am in Amman that is read at 5pm California time is a next-day answer every time. Ask for the support hours in your timezone and the escalation path when something breaks during an exam week.
8. What does it assume about devices and bandwidth?
   A tool designed for one laptop per student behaves differently in a shared computer room, on a projector, or on the phones students actually own. Ask what happens on a mid-range Android over school wifi with thirty concurrent users.
9. Does it work with the calendar you actually keep?
   Ramadan timings, national holidays, a school year that starts in late August or early September, and a term structure that is not the English one. The regional year has its own shape and a platform should bend to it rather than the reverse.
10. Are teacher seats included, or a second invoice?
    Ask specifically. A per-student price with a separate per-teacher charge is a quote that doubles at the point you actually roll it out.
11. Will students inside a school licence ever see a payment screen?
    If nominated students can be upsold inside your licence, you have bought a marketing channel into your own classrooms and the parent complaints are yours to handle, not the vendor’s.
12. What is the renewal price, in writing, now?
    Year one is a customer acquisition price everywhere in the world. Ask for years two and three before signing year one, and put the utilisation reporting you will be judging them on into the same document. The full cost arithmetic is here.

The three answers that should end a conversation

• “We can add Arabic in a future release.” Meaning: you are the customer who funds it, and your office staff work in English until then.
• “Our analytics are on the enterprise tier.” Meaning: the reason you are buying is priced separately, and your quote doubles when leadership asks for the screen you were shown in the demo.
• “We do not break out usage by school.” Meaning: you will renew without knowing whether anyone used it. This is the answer that should end the meeting.

Our answers, for what they are worth

Since the list is only useful if someone answers it, here are ours. PapaMarks is built in Amman, so several of these were not features so much as the conditions we started from.

Frequently asked questions

The regional questions are not extra difficulty. They are the ones that tell you whether the vendor has ever actually worked with a school like yours — which is usually the thing you were trying to find out anyway.

Last reviewed: August 2026. Corrections welcome.