Bitlis Eren University

Bitlis Eren University (BEU) has been established in 2007 with the aim of contributing to the development of the region and to the academic development of the country. BEU has become an internationally qualified university consisting of 5 faculties, 11 vocational schools, 2 institutes, 14 application and research centres, which have amenities with modern facilities that the students and the academics may need.

For the research and education in information and communication technologies, BEU has two departments which are collaboratively working: computer engineering and electrical and electronics engineering. Within these departments, there are 21 academic staff at different ranks. Six of these academic staff have obtained their PhD in the highly-ranked international universities (some of which are within the top 100 world-wide). Seven of the academics in these departments have obtained their PhD from the highly-ranked Turkish universities with a national PhD exchange programme. The ICT departments have recently become operational recruiting dynamic and qualified researchers in terms of research and development, and accepting bachelor level students (2018-2019 for Dept. of Computer Engineering). Additionally, the Science and Technology Application and Research Centre is committed to supporting the related research projects.

Together with the ICT departments, BEU has six departments in the Faculty of Engineering Architecture, which are: Civil Eng., Computer Eng., Electrical and Electronics Eng., Environmental Eng., Industrial Eng., and Mechanical Eng. In these engineering departments, there are 41 academic personnel and 14 administrative personnel working. Totally, there are over 9000 students and over 470 academics at the university.

BEU has also the Distance Education Research and Development Centre in its organisation and offers some degree programmes in a distance education setting. Currently, they are developing a distance education tool to be used in the university.

Bitlis Eren University (BEU) launched an internal project, BEU UZEP, to create an online service for remote education. BEU is developing a software for students and academics at the university to create live virtual classes in a better and flexible online environment, flexible homework submission and an exam system with increased security will be developed in the system. Innovation in the system will provide a safer exam environment by using institution servers.

Ayşe Saliha Sunar is an assistant professor with the Dept. of Computer Engineering at Bitlis Eren University. She completed her BSc in mathematics at Gazi University in Turkey in 2008. The next year, she was awarded a scholarship offered by the ministry of national education of Turkey for her postgraduate studies. She received her MSc in information science from Nagoya University, Japan in 2013 and pursued her academic career in the United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD at the University of Southampton where she researched on MOOCs. She attended an Erasmus+ Staff mobility for training between Programme Countries programme on creating and using MOOCs in engineering education in March 2019 at the Universita Degli Studi Di Napoli Federico II. She currently holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at Josef Stefan Institute (JSI), Slovenia. At JSI, she had the opportunity to work with European projects, such as the EU H2020 X5GON project which will be exploited thoroughly during this Erasmus+ project. Her current research interests are data mining, learning analytics and technology-enhanced learning with the focus on MOOCs. She also has a special interest in the studies on education of vulnerable people in today’s society.