School Digitalization in Turkmenistan Increases Workload for Teachers

The rollout of electronic gradebooks in Turkmenistan, intended to streamline teachers’ work, has had the opposite effect, with educators reporting increased workloads, technical issues, and tighter oversight. As part of a broader push toward digitalization, authorities have required school staff to use the eMekdep system to record grades, manage lesson plans, and generate analytics. According to its developers, the platform enables work “anytime, anywhere” and is designed to reduce paperwork. Teachers, however, say the reality is far less efficient. Electronic journals can only be filled out with a stable internet connection, which remains unreliable even in the capital. “If two people log into our school’s network at the same time, it crashes,” a teacher in Ashgabat said. As a result, many educators are forced to rely on mobile data or home internet at their own expense, an added burden given their relatively low salaries, which range from $175 to $275 per month. Teachers also report contributing financially to school needs, including repairs and equipment, and, in some regions, even covering costs related to hiring cotton pickers. The main challenge, however, is not financial but administrative. Paper gradebooks have not been phased out, leaving teachers to maintain three parallel records: an official paper journal, a working notebook, and the electronic system. This duplication significantly increases the risk of errors. To save data, many teachers first record grades by hand and later transfer them into the system at home, a process that often leads to delays and inaccuracies. Given that the majority of teachers are women, many must also balance these demands with family responsibilities. At the same time, oversight has intensified. Moderators at both school and district levels monitor how teachers fill out gradebooks. Discrepancies between paper and electronic records require written explanations. Deadlines for entering data have also been tightened from up to 10 days previously to just two days, with the possibility of further reduction to 12 hours. Schools may be reprimanded if teachers fail to meet these deadlines. Technical problems remain a major issue. Users report software bugs that can cause pages to take up to 30 seconds to load. “In that time, it’s faster to mark grades for an entire class with a pen,” one teacher noted. Earlier reports have highlighted broader restrictions on access to certain services and efforts to control alternative communication channels, including the confiscation of Starlink satellite internet equipment. In such conditions, digital solutions remain heavily dependent on infrastructure that often struggles to handle the load.