#LearningConnects: How Turkey laid the foundations for online learning before COVID-19 hit

#LearningConnects: How Turkey laid the foundations for online learning before COVID-19 hit

To help ETF partner countries deal with learning under lockdown, we've been having conversations with people dealing day-to-day with keeping education and training going despite social distancing and school closures to cope with the COVID-19 crisis.  

On April 28, we talked to three Turkish educators at the heart of the country's major new online teaching initiative - set up within days of the nationwide shut down of schools and training institutes on March 13.

Turkey saw its first confirmed case of coronavirus on March 11 - and the government, seeing the rapid spread across Iran, Italy and Spain, was fast to react, with quarantine measures and school shut downs within a couple of days. By the end of April the country had more than 120,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with more than 3,200 deaths reported and around 49,000 people had recovered.

Senior officials at the Ministry of National Education say that groundwork on Turkey's 2023 education vision statement- where social inclusion, equity and quality are key objectives - helped ensure that the response to the needs of more than 18 million students across the general and vocational sectors, and the million teachers involved in education, were swiftly met.

Prof. Adnan Boyaci, Director General of the Teacher Education and Training Department at Turkey's Ministry of National Education, said that the vision statements sees "teachers and principals as core change agents" with Continuous Professional Development (CPD) as central to the process. As part of ongoing teacher training and upgrades, the Ministry along with stakeholders that include UNESCO and international IT companies such as Microsoft, CISCO, Apple and others, had already laid the foundations for training teachers in information technology to international standards. The declaration of a global pandemic accelerated this programme, he says.

"These international technology companies have opened international certificate programmes to enable teacher certification in areas that include cyber security, database management, android applications and digital entrepreneurship."

Since the pandemic hit Turkey, "around 100,000 teachers have taken part in these activities and been certified by the companies and ministry."

This is the foundation for Turkey's swift and successful creation of online education tools over the past six weeks.

Anıl Yilmaz, director general of the department for Innovation and Educational Technologies at the Ministry of National Education, takes up the story.

"Although no one on earth was prepared for this pandemic, I can say Turkey was a bit prepared," he says, noting that UNESCO figures shows that by the end of the first week of April as many as 92 percent - 1.5 billion - students worldwide were impacted by measures introduced to combat coronavirus.

Turkey had already launched such online platforms as My Job, My Life and had - in common with other countries - been focusing on improving digital skills.

The country was, he notes, "fast and early" in shutting down schools - and in launching new online tools.

"We started distance learning on March 23 after a one week holiday, giving us a short time to get the new system ready. To make it more practical and accessible, we started with TV as a medium available to all and quickly introduced new channels.  We already had an established platform for teachers and children, EBA, and we then introduced online platforms to complement this."

From this base, a large expert team working under direction of the Ministry of National Education leveraged the platform, adding functionality that pulled in parents, allowing them to access their children's performance, and also to use some of the content.

The ministry has since added live, interactive classes for students preparing for national entrance exams and currently has around 50,000 simultaneous e-classes available.

Although capacity for concurrent use currently stands at 300,000, programmers are working to steeply increase that and there are also programmes to improve access for poorer families where children may not have access to Wi-Fi enabled devices. A deal with national Internet providers means that those that do, can access free bandwidth for their studies.

It all adds up to a success story he says, noting that more than a million students accessed the EBA service in its first two weeks, making it the sixth most popular global online education service and the top Turkish governmental site.

English teacher and mother, Aslinur Okay Çeylik, says that although she initially found online teaching a challenge, e-learning is proving a winner.

"The resource I use most is EBA," she says:

"Teachers can upload and download material, engage in forums, and build their own virtual classrooms in which they interact with students."

She uses the platform to assign students daily or weekly tasks and to engage in forums where she, or students, initiate discussions. She also uses Zoom for meetings - but for security reasons has the cameras switched off.

A surprising added benefit of using online learning is that it tends to engage parents more in the education of their children: Aslinur uses Whattsapp to "connect with parents to give them information about the tasks I assign and feedback and support on how their children are doing."

She notes that her daughter likes the fact that she can easily repeat lessons where she feels she has not quite mastered the content, or to use for revision purposes.

Online learning is, naturally, not without its challenges. A pressing issue in countries around the world is how to tackle examinations. Some countries have responded by simply dropping them, or by creating open book exams that test reasoning rather than factual retention. Although Turkey's online systems provide educators with masses of data, there are no plans currently to use this as a substitute for exams.

"We have the infrastructure to closely monitor what students are doing online and how they are doing in online tests, but we do not want to use this for official grading as we don’t wish for ease of access to the platform to become a tool for impacting grades," says Anıl Yilmaz. "We shall wait until students are back at school before making up for this gap."

His advice for other countries wishing to emulate Turkey's online education success is to use a blended approach, where media, TV and online platforms are balanced.

"You need a national point of view. Turkey is lucky to have a centralized system, but in many countries education is very devolved. In that case, you should assign a national taskforce to creating the e-learning system."

Turkey's response to the pandemic has not only been to build an e-learning system from scratch. It has also deployed the resources of vocational education and training schools to producing desperately needed Personal Protection Equipment for use by frontline medical staff.

"Our VET schools (vocational education and training institutes) initiated a programme to manufacture disinfectants, medical masks, face shields, ventilators and the N95 standard masks," says Prof. Boyaci.

Turkey has been restructuring VET education over the past couple of years and many skills are now taught through dual education, with students partially based at factories, businesses and enterprises. The coronavirus pandemic was the impetus to push this development a little further.

"It has been a tough process, but already our students have produced more than a million litres of hand sanitizer, 10 million masks and 65,000 protective overalls. These are all products in critical need in most countries."

Watch the full interview here.