Turkey’s Education Ministry unveils an AI-powered new version of its EBA platform for students and teachers

The launch

Turkey’s Ministry of National Education unveiled an AI-powered new version of its Education Information Network (EBA) at an event in the ministry’s council hall in Ankara on Oct. 28. Minister Yusuf Tekin described the New EBA project as the integration of AI with EBA’s large body of content and with the ministry’s other applications, and said the New EBA would show only some of the ministry’s AI applications. Mustafa Canlı, the ministry’s director general for innovation and educational technologies, also spoke, and elementary, middle and high school students presented the new system to Tekin at EBA demo stations.

Tekin said EBA has “around 6 million” active users, an area in which he said Turkey is “by far the best” among European countries; the ministry didn’t say how it defines an active user. Tekin said the digital infrastructure for education was built through the FATİH Project, launched in 2011, which brought internet access and interactive whiteboards to schools, and that EBA was then designed to be one of the world’s largest educational content portals. According to the IHA news agency, he also said about $9 billion has been invested in this infrastructure since 2011.

Planned features

The ministry’s own announcement doesn’t list the New EBA’s features; they appear as goals in news agency reports. According to IHA, the platform aims to bring students from preschool through high school, teachers, parents and school administrators together in a shared digital environment in line with the ministry’s Türkiye Century Education Model. The goal is to give students study plans tailored to their learning needs, content recommendations, progress reports and explained answers, and to help teachers prepare lesson plans, questions, activities and worksheets with AI. Anadolu Agency also reported that the New EBA aims to make lesson preparation and teaching easier for teachers.

According to IHA, separate interfaces have been designed for preschool, elementary, middle and high school students. The platform brings together modules such as lessons, assignments, exams, a library, books, live classes, projects, groups and “EBA AI.” Tracking students’ academic progress through learning analytics, increasing parents’ involvement in their children’s education and supporting data-driven decisions by school administrators are also among the platform’s goals.

The ministry’s other AI tools

Tekin said the ministry’s management system has also been built on an AI-supported infrastructure for making decisions from “billions of data points,” one that can instantly report anomalies at schools, from their physical condition to academic performance and staffing needs. He also pointed to MEBİ, for students preparing for the national exams for moving between school levels, and DİLİM, a language-learning app that currently offers English and Turkish, with Arabic and German planned. Tekin also claimed that MEBİ and EBA’s new AI-supported applications face smear campaigns from people who want to market their own products.

What hasn’t been disclosed

Neither the ministry’s announcement nor the news agency reports say which AI model or provider the New EBA uses, when the platform will open to all users or how student data will be handled under Turkey’s personal data protection law, KVKK.