Abstract
COVID-19 affected higher educational institutions around the world. This study focused on academics’ perceptions and practices of online education based on their academic discipline and previous online education experience. The survey research design used and an e-survey was conducted in May 2020, during which the lockdown restrictions were rather tight in Turkey. The analyzes were carried out on the responses of 8,242 academics’ using the omnibus chi-square test and t-tests. The results point out that academics’ time allocation to preparation for courses, student counselling, and lectures are varying due to their academic disciplines. Generally, academics have a negative perception of online education though there is a difference between the experienced ones and others. In particular, academics with online education experience exhibited lower negative perceptions of online education than those lacking such experience. Maybe one of the most problematic parts of this transition process for academics is how to ensure the reliability of exams. Our results showed that even the academics with online education experience have a higher level of distrust towards educational measurement and evaluation methods.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected higher education on a global scale never encountered before
Academics’ lecturing practices (Hativa, 1995), time used for teaching and preparation (Smeby, 1996), teaching methods (Neumann, 2001), curriculum development, communication with their students, the methods they use while assigning homework, or doing exams (Neumann et al, 2002) were different among different academic disciplines in traditional education
This study focuses on how academic disciplines and online teaching experience influence academics’ perceptions of online education
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected higher education on a global scale never encountered before. The concepts of distance education, online education, remote education, and e-learning have been used interchangeably over time with the opportunities provided by the developing technology. On March 31st, taking into consideration that some students do not have the opportunity to continue online education, they have been allowed to defer their enrollment in the spring semester of the 2019-2020 academic year. Universities with distance education centers started online education in a short time, while academics learned how to teach online using online education systems through ‘online education’. Even if the university had the necessary infrastructure or was able to provide it and academics had qualifications, at this point the first condition for students to access online education was whether they had physical facilities (internet connection, computer, or good learning environments). According to TurkStat’s (2020), Information and Communication Technology Usage Survey, households with access to the internet is 90.7% in Turkey
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