Özet:

The aim of this study is to examine the views of the instructors on distance education practices in the new normalization process that had been aroused with the global Covid-19 epidemic we are in. The study was carried out with survey research, one of the quantitative research methods. At the end of the 2020-2021 fall semester, 502 faculty members of Başkent University participated in the study. As a data collection tool, a questionnaire was created by the researchers and was composed of multiple choise, likert type and open-ended questions. The data were obtained by the questionnaire with four categories, which are the current situation of distance education technologies in the institution, instructors’ opinions about the institutional support, about usefulness of synchronous-asynchronous tools and about measurement-evaluation practices. Content analysis and descriptive analysis techniques were used in the data analysis. It was found that most of the courses in the institution were conducted remotely. The mostly used asynchronous platform is Moodle® based institutional web site, namely Learning Management System (LMS), and synchronous platforms are Microsoft Teams® and Zoom®. Regarding the LMS, where the lecturers share the course content in distance education practices, it’s technical capacity, interface design/ease of use, online exam features and support materials in the system were found to be sufficient in general for the instructors. Considering the synchronous tools, Zoom® was found to be more adequate in the categories of “ease of use”, “video-enabled participation feature/capacity” and “instructor control during the live meeting”, while Microsoft Teams® was stated to be more adequate in the category of “sharing of live lecture recordings”. Although various kinds of measurement tools have been used in the institution, there was mainly more tendency in use of “online exams with camera surveillance” and “flexible timely assignments and projects”. According to the instructors, while the most reliable measurement tools or types were “the oral exam” and “the project”, the least secure one was the “unsupervised online exam” in the distance education. Those important findings were discussed, and suggestions were made for both further research and practices.

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