Empowering Women through Online Education: A Case of North Cyprus

Abstract

Online learning increases the chances of women's access to education. Online learning helps women achieve their educational goals. In addition, it is seen as a potential solution to help women achieve their educational goals and ensure social, cultural and economic development of women worldwide. Because online learning provides flexible learning opportunities open to everyone with freedom of time and space, and facilitates education with the use of technology. In the light of the literature review and because of the scarcity of research about the education of women in North Cyprus, this study aimed to determine the educational needs of women living in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This is a quantitative study, and the data were collected from 500 volunteers randomly selected women living in Nicosia and Famagusta cities of North Cyprus. A survey generated by inductive method was administered to participants, and the data were analyzed with SPSS 23.0 program. Parametric tests were used in the analysis since the collected data showed a normal distribution. Descriptive statistics, such as percentage and frequency, were used to analyze demographic data. 80.6% of the participants require receiving English language education, 74.6% require social media education, 100% of the participants require receiving courses about baby care, child development, adolescence and mental health, 32.8% of them require healthy nutrition courses, 52.4% require ceramic courses, 98.6% of them would like to take part in a choir to receive music education and 56.4% would like to receive sports training. 50.4% of the participants would like to receive their training at their home as online learning, 88.6% would like to receive their training before noon on weekdays and 69.0% of them prefer to receive synchronous bidirectional interactive type of online learning. In addition, 55.6% of the participants would like to receive this training for free.