Distance Education Experiences of First-Year Undergraduate Students: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Introduction

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) statement issued on March 11, 2020, the coronavirus disease that had emerged in late 2019 affected 118,000 people in 114 countries. Following the statement, it was stated that the disease caused the death of approximately 5,000 people and it was declared as a pandemic (WHO, 2020). Many countries have taken a number of measures to protect themselves from the pandemic. The Council of Higher Education (CoHE) in Turkey announced a three-week break in education and training in universities as of March 16, 2020 in order to reduce the spread of the virus (CoHE, 2020a). Due to the uncertainty of the epidemic process, CoHE announced on March 26, 2020 that no face-to-face courses would be held in the spring semester of the academic year 2019-2020. Thus, distance education came to the agenda in Turkey (CoHE, 2020b). It has been stated that distance education will continue after this date. However, no deadline was announced for the distance education application. Students who had just started university education with the start of the 2020-2021 academic year did not even come to register on the campus. They have never experience any university environment. They also never had face-to-face interactions with friends and lecturers. These students were adapted to the university environment through distance education.

The process of adapting to distance education was not limited to these. This adaptation process was also reflected in the lessons. With the start of the lessons, the students turned on their microphones and started to participate in the lessons in this way. Towards the end of the semester, instead of turning on their microphones, they just started participating in lessons from the chat section. That's how the fall semester ended. By spring, the students had stopped using the chat section and started to participate in the lessons in a reluctant way. This reluctance of the students, lack of motivation and excuses for not being able to attend the lesson started to increase. Students associated these excuses with distance education each time. The fact that the students did not want to participate in the course led me, as a lecturer, to enter the lessons unprepared. After a while, I realized that we were entering a vicious circle and decided that it was necessary to investigate the distance education experience of students who had not yet breathed the air of the university environment. I understood that I could support students by revealing their experiences.

Throughout the pandemic process, the distance education experiences of the students, the challenges and opportunities they have experienced in this process, and the effects of distance education on the lives of the students can be revealed through that phenomenology study. With the data to be obtained, we can be informed about how and what kind of support should be given to students. For this reason, this section focuses on phenomenology, which is one of the methods based on the qualitative research approach and includes the titles that should be included in phenomenological research.