Evaluation of preschool distance education practices during COVID-19 pandemic

In December 2019, an outbreak with a high level of contagiousness called COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan province, China. Due to this global pandemic, educational institutions ended face-to-face education and had to switch to distance education without preparation. After the detection of the first COVID-19 case in Turkey on March 11, 2020, distance education was launched with the decision of the Ministry of National Education (MoNE), and preschool education institutions started to provide distance education through the platforms created by the MoNE. In this period, teachers, students, and parents who had to participate in preschool distance education processes for the first time encountered many problems and experienced the advantages and disadvantages of distance education. This research aims to reveal the experiences of teachers working in preschool distance education processes during the COVID-19 global pandemic period, the problems they encountered, the solutions they developed and the successful practices they carried out. It aims to develop suggestions on how they can better offer distance education if preschool distance education is re-implemented in future. This research, which follows the procedures of the basic qualitative research design, is based on data collected through in-depth interviews from eight teachers working in preschool distance education processes. In the data analysis, coding, category- and theme-constructing techniques were used by drawing on the interpretive approach that brings the perspectives of the participants to the forefront. According to the research findings, technological infrastructure has played a very important role in preschool distance education processes. In this process, the socio-cultural and socio-economic levels of the parents had a significant impact on the quality of preschool education. Teachers, who were caught unprepared for distance education processes, have developed many practices based on their own experiences in this process that increased the quality of distance education they offered. The findings of this research suggest that, in case of switching to distance education in the preschool period again in future, educational authorities must develop policies that will minimize the negative effects arising from technological inequalities and socio-cultural and socio-economic level of parents.