January 1996 — Features
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Use of Computers at High Schools in Turkey
Each year only about 23% of new high school graduates &emdash; and about the same percentage of all applicants &emdash; obtain a place in a higher education program (Figure 2).
In the academic year 1989-90, the centrally allocated budget designated for education was 12.2%, or 2.7% of the GNP. These are very low compared with 21.3% and 6.8% for Venezuela in 1985, and 18.1% and 6.7% for the U.S. in 1983. The quality of education in Turkey greatly suffers from lack of financial resources.
CAE in Turkey &emdash; 1984-1988
During the 1980s, as Turkey started laying the foundations for an Information-Based Economy, the problem of having a work force not sufficiently computer-literate became much more apparent.
Thus, the Ministry of Education (M'E) embarked on an ambitious computer aided education (CAE) project in 1984. The main components of the project were identified as:
- Preparing and integrating curricula;
- Software design and development;
- Training of teachers;
- Acquiring hardware;
- Incentives to produce hardware and components locally.
In the academic year 1985-86, as part of the CAE project, 1,111 computers were bought for 101 high schools &emdash; 10 for pupils and one for the teachers in each school. Two teachers from each school were trained for five weeks. Plus, 130 PCs were bought for 101 tourism and hotel-operation high schools.
Starting in the 1987-88 academic year, these schools introduced a computer-literacy course as an elective with a hands-on component. In the next academic year, 805 PCs were purchased to train pupils in vocational high schools, with some emphasis on hardware maintenance.
An article[3] assessing the foundation work done for the CAE Project during 1984-88 summarises the outcome:
