Evaluating distance education experience in public schools in Amman Second Directorate from students' perspectives

Abstract

Ensuring online learning quality in educational institutions was an increasing concern over the past few years. While several studies focused on the perspectives of faculty and officials, there was a dearth of search conducted on students' impression towards the quality of online education. The current study aimed to evaluate the experience of distance education in the public schools in Amman second directorate in light of the COVID-19 pandemic from students' perspectives. To that aim, the descriptive survey approach was used in addition to a questionnaire spread over five domains: communication, content, teaching, interaction, assessment in which validity and reliability were verified.  The study sample included 354 male and female students, chosen by the stratified random method from four public schools. The results of the study showed that the students' evacuation of the distance education experience on the instrument as a whole was moderate. The findings also indicated that there were statistically significant differences attributed to gender variable in the interaction domain and the instrument as a whole in favor of females, while the differences were not statistically significant for other domains. Based on the results, the researchers recommended the necessity of changing the evaluation approach and modifying the content and teaching methods to suit distance education, overcoming technical and technological difficulties, and conducting other research to evaluate distance education in secondary and lower elementary schools.