Evaluation of the distance education process in applied courses: A scale development study

The pandemic process with COVID-19, which has affected the whole world, has brought distance education with it. Universities, high schools, secondary schools, primary schools and private education institutions have started to provide education through distance education. Both teachers and students struggled to continue the education in this unusual new situation with deficiencies. On the other hand, how applied courses in education are taught in distance education and what kind of applications are used are important for designing more efficient courses in the future. In this context of the study, firstly, the concepts that make up the components of distance education were examined. Then, the measurement tool development process and the evaluation of the effectiveness of distance education from the perspective of teacher candidates continued in order to measure the effectiveness of applied courses in the distance education process. The participants of the study are a total of 402 teacher candidates from science, primary school mathematics, classroom teaching and pre-school teaching departments. The "Distance Education Process Evaluation Scale in Applied Courses" developed in the study consists of three main parts. The first section is the demographics. The second part is the distance education process which consists of two subsections. The first of these is the "evaluation of the distance education process in applied courses" subsection, which consists of three parts: application and learning process, productivity-success and course achievements and content. The second is the subsection of the general evaluation of the distance education process, which consists of three parts: technological opportunity and course management system, advantage-disadvantage and measurement and evaluation. Finally, the last part of the measurement tool is devoted to scanning the web applications used during distance education. A pilot study was carried out for the scale, which has a ready draft. As a result of the pilot study, the scale was finalized by arranging the items and factors with exploratory factor analysis. Afterwards, construct validity was examined by confirmatory factor analysis with the main application. Normality test was performed with the developed scale and it was found that the data showed normal distribution. For this reason, parametric tests were applied on the data. In order to evaluate the distance education process, the data were analyzed according to the variables of department, class, place of life of the participants and parent education. When the results are examined, it is concluded that there is no difference in the general context when the participants are examined according to the department they read, but some departments have different opinions in the sub-dimensions. In the examination made according to the variables of class level and the place where the participants live, it was concluded that there was no difference in the general context. However, when the sub-dimensions are examined separately, it is seen that the participants differ in the sub-dimension of technological possibilities and course management system. In terms of parent education variables, opinions differ in general context.