The faculty of Education is organizing two week-long training programs in İstanbul to enhance the digital skills of teachers to ultimately benefit 18 million students in Türkiye. The IPA-3 “Digital Ecosystem for Teacher Training” project is funded by the European Union and implemented by UNICEF and Bilkent University’s Faculty of Education, in collaboration with the Ministry of National Education.
The three-year EU IPA-3 project aims to develop an online teacher training platform offering 120 hours of interactive modules on digital skills. With a year and a half left to complete the project, the training modules have been developed and the project has reached the pilot training phase with the training of over 400 facilitators in two consecutive week-long sessions in İstanbul. Teachers will participate in content development and collaborate in eight teacher training labs.
The interdisciplinary project team consists of Faculty of Education Dean and UNICEF Project Leader Alipaşa Ayas, Armağan Ateşkan, İlker Kalender from the Faculty of Education, and Emel Özdora from the Communication and Design Department.
Prof. Alipaşa Ayas emphasized the significance of the project: “The training modules have been completed and now we are starting the implementation phase of the project and getting out into the field. We are hopeful that these training modules will enhance the digital skills of teachers in Türkiye and better prepare them for a changing digital world.”
Under the project, an initial cohort of 200.000 teachers, school administrators and other education personnel across the eight provinces of İstanbul, Yalova, İzmir, Ankara, Rize, Mersin, Erzurum and Gaziantep will undertake online digital skills training. They will then help to train other teachers, benefitting more than one million teachers across Türkiye.