SURVEYING THE DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN DISTANCE EDUCATION PRACTICES: THE CASE OF YTU FACULTY OF EDUCATION


Hotaman D., Özcan E.

ATLAS 8th INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCES CONGRESS, Ankara, Türkiye, 11 - 13 Haziran 2021

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Yıldız Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Education as a system is an important phenomenon for every society. This phenomenon is expected to contribute to social development and thus social, cultural and scientific enlightenment benefit from this development as well. In this context, education is an indispensable fact for human life as well as a very powerful variable that builds concrete bridges between the past and the future in terms of individuals and society. Transforming this variable into an uninterrupted state, even under all kinds of unpropitious conditions, will ensure the continuation of societies relatively. In the current age, distance education practices have become an alternative to formal education due to the developments in information and communication technologies. Such that, it has replaced face-to-face education practices that could not be implemented in Turkey due to the Covid-19 pandemic since March 2020, and therefore, to an extent, it provided uninterrupted education to the students. If information network in a country is sufficiently strong, distance education programs can be easily developed and implemented in that country. However, considering the different geographical regions of Turkey, and different socio-economical and educational background of family structures, it would be optimistic to think that all families and student groups have the necessary technological tools and equipment required for distance education and the opportunity to access this education without any issues. The aim of this study is to examine the difficulties that Yildiz Technical University, Faculty of Education students have experienced in distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study is based on a survey type research model. For data collection tools, an eight (8) item “Personal Information Form” and a twenty-six (26) item “survey” was prepared by the researchers in line with the feedback and opinions taken from students and experts. Questions used in the survey address the possible difficulties students may encounter in four sub-categories: "communication technologies, region of residence, social-health-psychological and academic". Six hundred and fourteen (614) students participated in this survey and at the end of the study, descriptive statistics (% and f) describing the participating students were gathered. Among these demographic features (e.g., gender, class, region of residence, device used for the distance education, and the number of siblings taking distance education simultaneously), whose descriptive statistics are given, it is analyzed whether there are significant differences between some variables and the difficulties students encounter in the distance education process by using chi-square (x2) test.  When the analysis results are examined; statistically concordant/significant relationships were found between “communication technologies”, “region of residence”, “social-health-psychological”, “academic” topics and the variable of “gender”, “class year”, “region of residence”, “device used to connect to the online education”, “availability of an own study room”.