Investigation of the attitude of physical and sports students to distance education during the COVID-19 outbreak Southeast Anatolia region

The purpose of this study is to examine the demeanors of the students of Physical Education and Sports Departments towards online education during the Covid-19 epidemic, which emerged in Wuhan, China and affected the whole world. The population of the study is composed of students who are actively studying at the Physical Education and Sports Departments of the universities in the cities of the Southeastern Anatolia Region, while the sample group consists of 357 universities in metropolitan cities and 398 universities in other cities (109 93 in Gaziantep, 90 in Siirt, 76 in Şanlıurfa, 69 in Şırnak, 92 in Batman, 71 in Kilis, 73 in Adıyaman and 82 in Mardin) Actively studying in Physical Education and Sports Departments. It consists of 755 students in total. Participants were administered the Demographic Information Form created by the researcher and the Attitude Scale towards Online Education (UEYTÖ), a five-factor Likert-type 21-question scale developed by Arslan, Bircan and Eleroğlu (2019). In this process, where universities generally conduct courses with online education, the attitudes of physical education and sports department students towards online education were compared with demographic information. Number, percentage, mean, and standard deviation were used as descriptive statistical methods in the evaluation of the data. In the analysis of data that did not show a normal distribution according to the normality test, the U-test was used to examine whether the difference between the averages of the two variables were significant. Kruskal-wallis was used to examine whether the difference between the means of more than two variables were significant. In multiple comparisons, repeated U-test was used to determine which variables were significantly different. SPSS 22.0 package program was used in the analysis of the data and the margin of error was accepted as 0.05. According to the test results, significant differences were determined according to the variables of gender, universities, department, classroom, pre-undergraduate computer-aided education, personal computer, device access to courses (p <0.05). With this study, it is expected to reveal the demeanors of the Physical Education and Sports Department students, who are generally accustomed to being in a state of sports activities and training, and how effective and beneficial it is to provide academic sports services in different dimensions and environments. Key Words: Physical Education and Sports, Covid-19 Pandemic, Distance Education, Attitude