Abstract:

With the Covid-19 pandemic, most countries including Turkey started emergency distance education applications to ensure the continuity of education. As a result, distance education applications have become a supportive and mandatory part of face-to-face education in the following process. A learning management system (LMS) is needed to carry out teaching activities in online environments in distance education. This study aims to reveal the views and experiences of teachers regarding LMSs, in which they carried out distance education applications during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study was designed as a case study pattern. The study data were collected in April-May 2021 with a semi-structured interview form. The research study group consisted of 10 teachers who actively used LMSs in the distance education process of the epidemic period, selected by criterion sampling method. The interviews were analyzed by the content analysis method. According to the findings obtained, the applications used by teachers to manage the distance education process are EBA, Google Classroom, Edmodo, Classdojo, Microsoft Teams, and Twinspace. It was determined that participant teachers use LMSs for course and project management, flipped education practices, personal and professional development activities, and management of extracurricular and guidance activities. While it was revealed in the research that the most crucial advantages of LMSs are that the parents and teachers quickly follow the learning process of the students, the lessons are more efficient and fun, and these systems allow the students to progress according to their pace; it was seen that the most critical difficulty encountered is the deficiencies related to technological equipment. For the solution of problems encountered with LMSs; it was recommended to get parent support, to inform parents and students about training, to ensure active participation of students in the process and to increase interaction, to get information from experienced teachers and experts, to make the process more enjoyable with Web 2.0 tools and gamification.

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