The University Instructors' Opinions About Emergency Remote Education in Turkey

Literature Review

Distance education has a critical role in education and provides many advantages. Due to technological advancements, distance education has transformed into an online format; subsequently, online campuses, courses, and programs have emerged and become widespread due to facilitating access to learning materials, promoting cost-effectiveness, and providing personalized learning environments (Moore & Kearsley, 2011). With the recent Covid-19 outbreak, educational institutions have moved their practices to an online format, taking into consideration the advantages of distance education. Although the practices during the Covid-19 pandemic seem to be distance education, the current literature distinguishes online or distance education from emergency remote education. While distance education is expressed as a more planned and guided practice that offers an alternative method to face-to-face education, emergency remote education is a sub-branch of distance education that emerged as an obligation to survive in the time of crisis (Bozkurt et al., 2020). Given the rapid and obligatory transition to online education due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the practices in the current situation could be considered emergency remote education.

The research studies in the literature explained that emergency remote education revealed some of the challenges regarding educational implementations. The digital divide is one of the problems and it is expressed as the division between those who are able and unable to access digital technologies (Selwyn, 2004). The practices in emergency remote education highly depend on technological devices and the internet; as a result, the digital divide became a more evident problem (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020). A recent study, which spans the reflections from many countries around the world (Bozkurt et al., 2020), stated that the digital divide was prominent in both developed and developing countries; people accessing digital technologies managed the emergency remote education process better than those who do not have them. In another study, Fishbane and Tomer (2020) pointed out that students who are unable to afford digital technologies and high-bandwidth internet connections struggled with additional problems to catch up with their peers in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly, Bozkurt (2020a) noted that emergency remote education practices during the Covid-19 pandemic increased social injustice and widened the gap among students depending on the facilities they have. Hence, the digital divide could be said as one of the challenges that emerged as a result of emergency remote education.