Turkey's Old-Fashioned Distance Education Draws the Largest Student Body on Earth

Anadolu University uses radio, TV, and (gulp) mailed material to educate a rural population

By BRYON MacWILLIAMS

A digitized glimmer materializes against the violet background of the television screen and, in one long, golden swoosh, approaches the foreground like a comet. An announcer, whose image is superimposed at the bottom right, welcomes a nationwide audience on a recent weekday evening.

For the next hour, Turkey's government television will broadcast a prerecorded lecture in economics from Anadolu University. Since 1982, the university has relied on Turkish-language television and other instructional technologies to cultivate a public distance-education system that spans over 300,000 square miles. With 504,000 students, it is the largest university on earth, according to the World Bank.

The government is attempting to bring the opportunities of its wealthy, industrialized western region to the mostly agrarian, sparsely populated eastern part of Turkey. Officials believe that distance education -- called "open education" here -- will play a major role in that effort.

"We know very well how important education is for Turkey, because if we educate very well, we will have a chance to compete with other countries," says Nazmi Ulutak, a vice dean of the open-education department at Anadolu. "Today, the world is an open market. It all depends on your abilities, work ethic, and intelligence."

Over the past two decades, Anadolu has moved from delivering distance education through mass mailings to broadcasting lectures on radio and television, as well as distributing them on videocassettes. More recently, the university has experimented with teleconferencing. No matter how the lectures are delivered, urban students in some courses meet in person with local adjunct professors.

Ali Ekrem Ozkul, dean of the university's open-education department, says that distance instruction is preferred by "those who do not have the time or resources to enroll in conventional schools," such as mothers with children, people who are working, and those with disabilities.

Anadolu University, also known as Anatolia University, was created in 1981 from an older institution, the Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences of Eskisehir, as part of a sweeping reorganization of Turkey's higher-education system. Its mission is to provide distance instruction in higher education.

It immediately proved popular. By the 1982-83 academic year, Anadolu's open-education department had enrolled 29,479 high-school graduates in the fields of economics and business administration. Those disciplines have long remained the most popular. In 1999, they attracted 182,000 and 157,000 students, respectively, who were working toward bachelor's degrees.

An additional 166,000 students are enrolled in 16 other programs that award either associate degrees or certificates of completion. Associate offerings include accounting, banking and insurance, business administration, home economics, nursing, office management, public relations, sales management, and tourism and hotel management. Since 1996, Anadolu has also trained teachers for Turkey's elementary and secondary schools.

In 1998, the World Bank recognized Anadolu as the world's largest university.

Under Turkish law, any university may offer open education, but no other public university does. "It's a very complicated process ... and you have to invest a lot of money in the beginning," says Atila Barkana, vice rector of the university.

Anadolu's tuition is about $130 for the 2000 academic year. Turkey's per-capita income was $3,071 in 1998, the latest year for which such information is available, according to the United Nations Statistics Division.

Students in disciplines such as nursing and hotel management pay 10 percent more because of the added costs of hands-on instruction. The 2000 annual budget for open education at Anadolu is $32.4-million, 76 percent of which comes from tuition and fees paid by students.

Anadolu University is based here on a hill overlooking the terra-cotta roofs of two- and three-story apartment buildings, a view spiked by the lean minarets of mosques. Gusts carry calls to prayer from various off-campus loudspeakers, and sometimes the words and voices overlap and intersect. The campus resembles an American office park with its scalloped curbing, sinewy roads, and buildings all of the same white stucco.

The lobbies and offices are lavished with Turkish flags and portraits, photographs, and plaster casts of Kemal Ataturk, who remodeled Turkish society between the end of the War of Independence, in 1922, and his death, in 1938. Scattered everywhere -- in display cases in lobbies, in windows, and on walls of offices -- are omelet-size glass eyes of translucent dark blue, sky blue, white, and yellow, with black pupils, to ward off the evil eye.

Some 400 textbooks have been edited and printed here. Hundreds of radio programs and 2,200 television programs have been produced here as well. Two studios in the three-story TV Center Institute generate the six hours of programming that the university broadcasts nationwide every day on Channel 4 of the Turkey Radio and Television Corporation.

The university has 81 administrative centers throughout the country's 83 provinces. In 58 of the centers, academic counseling is provided, and students can attend noncompulsory evening classes several times per week. Only 8 percent of the student body has access to computers, so 14 centers also provide Internet connections. The university's Web site (http://www.anadolu.edu.tr) recycles past examinations to help students prepare for future tests.

The system extends its reach to Nicosia, in northern Cyprus, as well as to Cologne, Germany, which enables the university to reach Turks living in Western Europe. A pilot marketing course was recently taught through videoconferencing at a Turkish-language preparatory school in Kazakhstan.

The university recently received a boost when the Ministry of Education designated it to prepare the country's preschool and English teachers, beginning this fall. The ministry's decision was based in large part on Anadolu's reach, which will enable it to offer instruction even in Turkey's eastern regions.

Nevertheless, respect and prestige have been slow to come to Anadolu. There are concerns about the rigor of its courses, in part because examinations are conducted exclusively through multiple-choice questions. And diplomas from Anadolu do not indicate that degrees were earned by distance instruction, apparently reflecting employers' distaste for such degrees.

"We have fought so much with ordinary universities for the past 18 years," says Mr. Ulutak, the vice dean. "It has been very difficult for us, especially some 10 years ago, because most of the business associations did not care all that much for graduates from our open-education programs."

Graduates now receive a warmer reception, says Nuvit Oktay, an economics professor at Anadolu's campus here. "It was not easy for the first graduates, but by now people in the business sector have gotten used to the concept [of open education] and graduates have the same rights under law."

Guliz Ger, an associate provost and professor of marketing at Bilkent University, a private institution in Turkey, agrees that Anadolu's image has improved, especially in fields such as advertising and communications. But he says that graduates "are still being looked upon with skepticism in comparison to those students who hold diplomas from conventional universities."

The university faces difficulty in upgrading its standards, however, because it is legally required to accept any applicant who scores at least 105 on the national entrance examination, for which the average score is from 150 to 170. Elite, state-run institutions in Turkey require scores of 220 on the exam. About 11 percent of the 1.5 million people who took the test in 1999 ended up in the open-university department at Anadolu.

However, Mr. Ozkul, the department's dean, says the test statistics are misleading. Test scores, he says, "are not an indicator of the intellectual level or capability of students ... because most of our students have no time, no opportunities to study for the entrance exam. They are from the rural side of Turkey. They just were not prepared properly."

The university also has a low graduation rate. According to the most recent figures, only 34 percent of those who enter the two-year program earn degrees within two years, and just 23 percent of those who begin four-year programs receive degrees in four years. But that may reflect, in part, that about 76 percent of the university's students hold part- and full-time jobs.

"It was difficult for me, and I have a lot of self-discipline, to maintain my job and pursue an education at the same time," recalls Bulent Acma, a 1987 graduate who studied economics while living in the eastern city of Gaziantep.

In many ways, Mr. Acma embodies the ideal of distance education. The former student from the rural east now serves as an adviser to chambers of commerce in the west. He also is an associate professor at Anadolu, where he lectures graduate students on the environmental consequences of urban and regional development.

Yet his resume makes no mention of the open-education department through which he earned his bachelor's degree in economics. "There's been a big change recently in Turkey as to how [such graduates] are perceived," says Mr. Acma, "but not enough yet."

Easy-to-print version

E-mail this article