The Emergency Remote Teaching: A State University Experience

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency remote teaching in higher education institutions across Turkey in 2020 has become mandatory as of March. Emergency remote teaching practices added new applications for most of the instructors such as virtual classroom, online teaching, distance evaluation; those revealed different opinions based on experience on the positive and negative aspects and quality of the applications. This research was conducted to evaluate all these experiences held at a state university with a distance education center and a distance education database system but having only limited experiences on online courses before the emergency remote teaching in Turkey. The data set of the study was composed of the opinions of a group of instructors who participated in the distance teaching process for the first time and the official correspondence and reports made to organize, manage and evaluate the process during the first period of emergency remote teaching. The research is a qualitative case study where data obtained from different data sets are analyzed comparatively, inductively, and deductively. The results of the research show that within the scope of emergency remote teaching, the regulations regarding the application content in different faculties of the university should be differentiated, and this can be partially met during the emergency distance education process. In the context of effective and efficient use of the emergency remote teaching process, positive/negative situations have been experienced in terms of adapting to the database used in the teaching process, adapting existing teaching approaches, measuring and evaluating learning outcomes, and ensuring the participation of students in all these. Although instructors generally consider distance education as more student-centered practices and find the opportunities, it will provide positive in this context, but the effect of compulsory emergency remote teaching on learning outcomes was uncertain. Some suggestions are presented for the efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency of the implementation.