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SEBIT Education and Information Technologies Inc. is an e-education company based in Ankara, Turkey. The company is fully owned by Türk Telekom and it is located at Technopolis zone of the Middle East Technical University.

Origins
The roots of the company dates back to 1988, the establishment of a Multimedia Laboratory within the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). The first research topic taken up by the newly established laboratory was computer supported education. It was soon accompanied by other R&D projects which had high impact outcomes such as the award winning promotional interactive software developed for the Turkish pavillion in Seville Expo '92. In 1996, the laboratory was privatized and the group started the development of high quality, multimedia rich instructional K-12 e-education products utilizing 8 years of R&D work.

Corporate Progress
SEBIT was privatized by Science Council Decision in 1996. In November 1999 Doğuş Group, which is one of the largest conglomerates in Turkey, acquired the company. In July 2002, SEBIT was acquired by Siemens and started to operate as the official e-Learning Center of Competence for Siemens group globally. After the major scale down of Siemens AG in 2005, SEBIT was carved out and since December 2007, SEBIT is fully owned by Türk Telekom.

There are three universities neighboring the Technopolis zone where SEBIT is located: Middle East Technical University, Bilkent University and Hacettepe University. Another three, Gazi University, Ankara University and TOBB University of Economics and Technology are close by. The company runs joint projects and draws graduates from these universities. The workforce of nearly 160 people are not only from instructional technology departments but also from various fields such as computer engineering or industrial design. The diverse workforce is gathered to be able to address all aspects of educational technology applications with large scale projects, covering not only content, system and infrastructure development, but also curriculum analysis, pedagogical modelling and teachers training. The company philosophy is to seek academical perfection, research innovation and industrial quality all at once.

Main Product History
In 1998, the first complete product of SEBIT was released. It was a 40 CD-ROMs set called Akademedia, which covered the whole middle and high school curriculum of Turkey. It was also localised for China in Mandarin under the brand name "Tian-yi", which was approved and recommended to secondary education institutions by Chinese Ministry of National Education (March 2002). Using the same technological basis 2 major projects on full grade e-education teaching material for the Malaysian Ministry of Education were completed. First distributed by direct marketing, Academedia was later broken down to grade-course based single CD-ROM units for mass market retail and finally was re-worked with updated content to run completely Web-based. This version is now available free of charge (as a donation from Turkish Telecom) to all state teachers and to all state schools. It is also available for home use with an annual fee, via Turkish ISPs. This sets a hybrid educational technology model where material used or assigned in the classroom can later be studied at home.

SEBIT has been developing US version of its content by reusing Vitamin and in collaboration with Arizona State University since 2007. The US product is called Adaptive Curriculum. Adaptive Curriculum is localized to the needs of the US education market and it has been adapted to all different state curricula in US. In 2008, Adaptive Curriculum received CODiE, AEP , Teachers’ Choice , EdNET , and EDDIE awards. Adaptive Curriculum is also a finalist of the Codie 2009 for ‘Best Science Instructional Solution’ and ‘Best Online Instructional Solution’ awards.

The iClass Project
Submitted to the first call of the Sixth Framework Programme of European R&D, the [www.iclass.info iClass Project] was kicked-off in February 2004 and lasted 54 months. Under the technical coordination of SEBIT, 22 partners from 11 countries completed this integrated project on personalised Technology-Enhanced Learning. The partners of the iClass consortium included industry leaders like Siemens, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, as well as school networks, research institutes and academia such as University of Graz, University of London and Trinity College Dublin.

The mobile e-learning project SMILE is another European Union funded project under the Leonardo da Vinci programme that SEBIT contributed.

Corporate e-Learning
Examples of larger scale corporate e-learning projects in Turkey are a few. Major references from SEBIT include the development and management of the training site for Turkish Banks Association, custom content development for The Coca-Cola Bottling Company, development of new procurement law trainings for the Turkish Procurement Authority and development of Electronic Warfare Training for Undersecretariat for Defense Industries.

Technology Partners
The company has established partnerships with Microsoft, Intel Education Initiative, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Learning Institute, Learning.com and Technology Based Learning and Research Center of Arizona State University (ASU). The Learning.com partnership is for providing access to Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects through the Digital Learning Environment from Learning.com. . The partnership with ASU is for drawing educational technology expertise and resources to help launch Adaptive Curriculum successfully into the K-12 education marketplace.