Abstract:

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance and the number of opened centers of Distance Education Centers (DEC) have increased. The institutional structuring, goals and stakeholders of the DECs, whose number has increased with the pandemic, may be different from each other. In this study, the institutional web pages of DECs in the Turkish higher education system were examined. Within the scope of this study, the names used by DECs, the guides they prepared for students and lecturers, the support services they provided, the technologies they used and the vision and mission statements of them were examined. The data of the study, which was designed as a qualitative case study, were obtained by visiting the institutional web pages between 28.03.2022 and 20.05.2022. As a result of the study, it was determined that DECs mostly used the name "Distance Education Application and Research Center", they offered 139 guides for students and 135 guides for lecturers. It was seen that the most used support services by DECs are e-mail, institutional phone number, form and support system. It was also detected that the most widely used technologies were ALMS, Microsoft Teams, Moodle, Zoom, BigBlueButton and Perculus+. It was revealed that the vision texts of DECs was focused on the clusters named target, background and focus, while the mission texts was focused on the clusters named environment, education and process. As a result, a more detailed review can be done in order to evaluate the usability of DECs institutional web pages.

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