Investigation of university students' opinions towards online education during the Covid-19 pandemic: The case of foundation university

Educational institutions are undoubtedly one of the sectors affected by the rapidly increasing technological developments brought about by our information age. While the increase in education demands accelerates the change in education day by day, the development of the distance education model has progressed as online distance education has become mandatory because of the pandemic in recent years. With the new conditions brought by the sudden change that emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of online education has started the transformation process in education. With the pandemic, face-to-face teaching was stopped for a while, and distance education was used to ensure continuity in education and make education sustainable. In the study, online education, which is the change process in education during the pandemic, was evaluated in terms of university students. In the investigation, the opinions of undergraduate and graduate students studying at a foundation university during the pandemic on online education, their perspectives on motivation, self-efficacy, measurement-evaluation, technical structure, teaching methods, readiness, and lifelong learning experiences, and the end-of-term student evaluation questionnaires. The data in the research were collected according to qualitative research methods and techniques. During the data collection phase, a semi-structured interview form was used to obtain in-depth information about the online education process. The open-ended questions were prepared voluntarily by recording online or face-to-face. The research sample consists of 26 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs who participated in online education during the COVID-19 epidemic. The document analysis method was used for the data obtained from the end-of-term student evaluation surveys. When the results obtained from the participants in the research were examined, it was determined that the distance education process was advantageous in the university context, and the general opinion about the process was positive. Still, its negative aspects also pose a severe problem for the educational methods.