Determining the Opinions of University Students on Distance Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic Process

Introduction

In line with the technological developments in recent years, internet-based technologies have been widely used. With this progress, online education and e-learning have become widespread in the education processes of universities. The COVID-19 epidemic, which affects the whole world, has seriously affected the education sector, as well as the social, economic and political fields, as well as the health sector. However, the importance of e-learning has emerged (Ada et al, 2021: 1739).

The Covid-19 pandemic emerged in Wuhan, China in November 2019 and quickly spread all over the world. It was declared a “pandemic” by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. The Presidency of the Council of Higher Education has decided that universities in Turkey will suspend education for 3 weeks as of March 16, 2020, and have decided to conduct distance education activities at universities that provide distance education infrastructure as of March 23, 2020 (Şen and Kızılcalıoglu, 2020: 240).

The decision to switch to distance education has also been made in many countries around the world, apart from underdeveloped countries. This process has been difficult almost everywhere. Especially, countries that could not prepare technical infrastructure and strategic plan for online education before the Covid-19 pandemic were able to overcome the transition more easily, while countries with infrastructure deficiencies and no digital content preparation had difficulties. Besides, distance education applications were tried for the first time out of necessity and unprepared in many people, institutions and countries (Cobo, Munoz-Najar, & Ciarrusta, 2021).

Considering the danger in the course of the epidemic and the risk of contamination, such a decision in our country, as in many other countries of the world, is a very appropriate decision to implement distance education methods in order to avoid learning losses for students who stay at home for a long time and not be adversely affected by this process (Sözen, 2007: 304) has both positive and negative effects on students and educators.

While supporting students in an online learning environment can be a difficult challenge for universities and relevant faculty members, it is important for universities to be constantly mindful of how faculty are accessible, how students interact with academic content, and manage personal opinions about problematic students (Kelly, 2020).

Thanks to distance education, it is possible to deliver education opportunities to wider audiences by removing some or all of the limitations of the education service, independent of the concepts of time and space. However, with the rapid start of the process, students who were unprepared for distance education activities also experienced some problems from time to time. In this process, the aim of this study is; It is the determination of university students' views on the process with the rapid transition of higher education institutions to the distance education process before the infrastructure, preparation and training processes of the trainers are completed with the effect of the pandemic.

It is seen that distance education and e-learning processes, which are passed for compulsory reasons in order to reduce the risk of epidemic with the Covid 19 pandemic, are also used in education activities in the ongoing processes. However, making it a viable system instead of being an emergency solution would be advantageous in many ways. Trying to understand students' attitudes towards e-learning and thus distance education may be effective in terms of creating suitable e-learning environments and increasing the quality of the process in the future.