Turkey's eSchool (e-Okul)

Turkey's Ministry of National Education launched a comprehensive project called e-Okul in May 2006. In accordance with the project, all the identification information found in the Central Population Management System, namely MERNIS, of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and school registration information such as class, branch of each student has been recorded into the central information system by the schools using the unique identification numbers in duration of nearly one month. All of the students found in formal education are aimed to be recorded into the system in the near future. Transferring a student to another school is carried out electronically by the system.

Main results, benefits and impacts

By the usage of this e-school service, all of the schools throughout Turkey started to give up buying software and decreased their software expenditures for carrying out student registrations. With this project, all the registers and standard forms held by the schools, numbering up to 30 for each school type, will be handled through the central information system over the Internet, preventing unnecessary paperwork and waste of other resources. There will be no need to the various school registration software procured by the schools.Wearisome practices like letter correspondence or data entry through a web site in order to retrieve statistical information from the schools will no more be required. Parents can monitor the student information without attending the parents meeting or waiting the student’s report card. With this project, all the students’ information will be placed in central information system of Ministry of National Education. Therefore, the bank records including the identification number of the student will be easily compared to the records in the Ministry, and this process will greatly be sufficient for preparing the exam files.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The educational requirements, such as building new schools or classroom, employing new teachers or procuring new equipment, regarding potential or existing students, based on the combined information from MERNIS and information systems of the Ministry of Health can be objectively assessed and more healthy decisions can be taken about these requirements. Scope: National