Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak has forced countries to take extensive measures aimed at minimizing human contact. In this crisis period, distance education has played a crucial role in ensuring continuous learning. However, not all locations have had the same maturity level regarding infrastructure availability, and the city-level heterogeneity in socioeconomic structures might have impeded equal access to distance education. This paper focuses on the contextual dimension of distance education by a comparative approach between in person and distance education outcomes in Turkey. By a multilevel modelling approach, student outcomes are examined against a set of student-level and city-level determinants of academic success during the COVID-19 period compared to the same academic semester in the previous year. The findings support previous studies, discussing the long-term contextual effects on student outcomes and show that the digital divide between the rural and urban areas and income inequality are the main drivers of city-level variation in students' success during the pandemic.
Highlights
As one of the major measures against the COVID-19 outbreak in spring 2019, teaching activities moved online almost everywhere in the world
As introduced in the previous section, the stepwise method starts with an empty multilevel model to examine the city level variation of grades in the two periods
The Intra-class Correlation Coefficient (ICC) are used to compare the two periods, which are interpreted as the city level effects in explaining the student success
Summary
As one of the major measures against the COVID-19 outbreak in spring 2019, teaching activities moved online almost everywhere in the world. Online education has already become a common practice thanks to the rapid developments in Information and Communication Technologies (Pathak, 2016). The recent transition from in-person to distance education was unexpected and brought significant uncertainties for higher education institutions, instructors and students (UNESCO, 2020). There is a growing literature on the observed and potential effects of distance education under the pandemic (Ludvigsson, 2020; Aucejo et al, 2020; Gonzalez et al, 2020). 150 | Umut TÜRK distance education and cities that have suddenly become the hosts of students who access distance education using city infrastructure. This paper aims to focus on this unexplored research area by using administrative data from a Turkish university
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