While OECD and Turkey: Responding to COVID-19 and Looking Beyond: Lessons from Turkey’s Education Emergency Response and Digital Education Reforms for a New Way of Teaching and Learning is being discussed in the webina, the OECD just released a draft continuity story on Turkey's app for students with special needs: https://oecdedutoday.com/turkey-i-am-special-in-education/

"In the outset of the COVID-19 crisis, the Turkish Ministry of National Education (MoNE) has established a series of policy actions to maintain educational services and meet the larger needs of the society as a whole. When schools closed on 17 March 2020, Turkey could rely on a strengthened distance education environment to provide teachers, students and parents with an extensive variety of solutions for pedagogical continuity. The deployed solutions immediately covered all classes from primary to secondary education (including vocational education and training) and partly consisted in a package of academic, social and psychological support delivered through online teaching, radio, TV broadcast (e.g. TRT Okul) and telephone (Ozer, 2020). As early as 23 March 2020, Turkey was able to provide distance education nationwide to its 18 million students through the Educational Information Network (EBA), the country’s official platform for online education. Supported by Turkey’s top three mobile operators that offered all students 8 gigabytes of free data, 12 million K-12 students and 900 000 teachers could immediately access the 1 600 lessons and 20 000 interactive contents curated on the platform, making it the second largest state-owned platform for online education at that time, behind China’s. EBA has served as a generic hub for distance learning as it hosted Turkey: Özelim Eğitimdeyim (I am special, I am in education) The coronavirus crisis led schools and universities to rapidly transition to a distance-learning mode, via the Internet, television or radio. This series documents some country initiatives that ensured education continuity for all using technology and provided support to teachers, students, and their families.
Several TV programmes, integrated psychological support centres and allowed up to 2.7 million users to hold virtual classrooms at the same time. In June 2020, Turkey further invested in a project on Safe Schooling and Distance Education with the World Bank support. This longer-term strategy will notably finance the development and rollout of a New Digital Education System (NDES) and the expansion of EBA, as the aim is to enhance the capacity, reach and resilience of Turkey’s education system during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and future shocks. As part of this multi-modal toolkit to mitigate school building closures, the Turkish MoNE has developed a mobile application to support the participation of students with special needs in distance education. Called Özelim Eğitimdeyim (I am special, I am in education), the application essentially consists in a mobile adaptation of the generic EBA platform specifically designed for students with all sorts of special needs, from learning difficulties through to sensory and cognitive impairments. The I am special, I am in education application provides an intuitive portal for students with special needs and their family to access the hundreds of educational resources, activities, videos and lessons that have been prepared and uploaded to the EBA platform mostly before but also during the pandemic. It works as a bridge for people who would otherwise be left out of the usual distance education solutions as they sometimes neglect visual or hearing impairments, assume learners’ autonomy and only rarely put interaction and personalisation at the core of their learning strategy. Because its development mainly consisted of redeploying existing resources, the implementation of the application was particularly cost-effective. The application has the following functionalities: • Giving easy access to the curated subset of learning resources available on the national EBA platform that was designed or is appropriate for students with different types of special needs; • Giving access to specific resources for parents and caregivers to support their children with special needs, for example guidance and training to help them set up an appropriate environment for home-based teaching and learning, or a calendar helping them to structure the learning activities of their children over time; • Providing technical functionalities and services as well as following standards for the selected resources that make them appropriate for different types of impairments (for example loud text reading from screen, sign language, dyslexia-friendly fonts, etc.); • Providing inter-operability with major external technology devices supporting children with special needs, so the learning resources can also be used on those devices; • Embedding a social network for users (students, parents, teachers), allowing them to upload homemade creations (images, videos and learning activities) and share them publicly with the application user community. The Ministry started to develop the application one week before schools closed in Turkey, and it took only three weeks to make it available free of charge on Google Play and Apple Store. Within the first two weeks of deployment, the number of special education resources channelled from the EBA platform to students with special needs at home had doubled. As of September 2020, the application had been downloaded over 350 000 times across Turkey and counted 117 000 active users."
OECD just released a draft continuity story on Turkey's app for students with special needs: https://oecdedutoday.com/turkey-i-am-special-in-education/ https://oecdedutoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Turkey-I-am-special…