HOW TO MANAGE REMOTE LEARNING AND TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION DURING THE LOCKDOWNS: CASE OF TURKEY

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, the authorities of the educational system from elementary school even from preschool level to higher education level has immediately decided to move the education from face to face to online teaching and learning. However, the shutting down of schools, colleges, and universities creates new problems particularly for the managers of the higher education institutions. Most of the stakeholders – professors, instructors, teachers, managers, and even technical people – have suffered to sustain the quality of education. Hence, most of the best universities’ managers have to rethink, redesign, and redevelop the online education not only for the lockdown periods but also for long term strategies. In Turkey, the education system in which there are many students than in many other countries demands well developed strategies to improve formal, Informal, and non-formal education taking into account digital pedagogy and engagements. To analyze critically how the Turkish universities manage remote learning and teaching during the lockdowns, the quantitative research had been strategically conducted. The primary goal of the quantitative data is to deeply understand how the Turkish universities manage remote learning and teaching by taking into consideration the participants (n=321) who are teachers, managers, and students. In this descriptive survey to assess, the perception of the participants towards online teaching-learning from the higher education management perspective is deeply analyzed. As the procedure of data collection, two questionnaires had been developed to conduct quantitative analysis on the perception of the teachers and students separately on online teaching-learning experiences. Collected data from the two questionnaires were analyzed by using the descriptive statistics for quantitative data. The analyses show that the Turkish universities have developed their own online learning management systems, but not all of them have the same facilities and infrastructure to sustain the online learning and teaching. Even though the university management is ready for the online education, it is really very difficult for all the lecturers to make ready for online teaching. Most of the teachers (85%) have declared that they need new and updated study materials. As the lecturers have mentioned that in the spring and fall semesters when they have practiced online teaching, they have difficulties in transferring the knowledge, particularly in the classes where they need experiments, case studies, and applications. They all agree that they could transfer theoretical part of the courses but not the applied parts. Nevertheless, as the students have pointed out, they have felt alone in solving their problems. Most of them are not ready from the technological infrastructure: some of them left their dorms and went to their homes in which they do not have highly developed technological devices or/and the Internet capacities to follow the classes. The data shows that the management of the higher education institutions has the policies from top to bottom: they have left the lecturers in choosing the system where most of the lecturers and students have suffered in adapting the online learning and teaching. Beyond the formal online systems of the universities, the stakeholders have used WhatsApp/Telegram and emails for educational interactions, submission of assignments, clarification of doubts and conducting class tests.