Examining teachers' attitudes towards distance education and digital literacy of them: The case of Bursa province

The significant effects of the Covid-19 epidemic, which has great effects on the world, on education and the sudden changes due to these effects have rapidly increased the need for distance education (Can, 2020). Due to the increasing need for distance education, the attitudes of teachers, who are the biggest practitioners of this, towards distance education and their digital literacy situations levels have gained more importance than ever before. In this study it has been discussed that the attitudes towards distance education and digital literacy situations of 432 teachers working in public and private schools in Bursa province in the 2020-2021 academic year. In the study one of the descriptive research types, survey model was used. Questionnaires prepared with Google Forms were sent to all teachers working in schools in Bursa via e-mail and WhatsApp communication application. The attitudes towards Distance Education Scale developed by Ağır (2007) and the Digital Literacy Scale developed by Üstündağ et al. (2017) were applied to the teachers participating in the research and their attitudes towards distance education and digital literacy situations in terms of gender, age, type of institution, level of employment, professional seniority. Data were analyzed using SPSS v23 package program. Before the data were analyzed, the normality of their distribution was examined and it was concluded that all dimensions showed normal distribution. Therefore, parametric analyzes were applied, and t-test and ANOVA were used from these tests. According to the significance of the ANOVA results, a significant difference between the groups was revealed with the Post hoc tests. In the study, the p significance value was taken as <.05. At the end of the study, teachers' attitudes towards distance education were found to be low. In addition, teachers' attitudes towards distance education differ significantly according to their level of work and professional seniority variables. The digital literacy status of the teachers was at a good level. In addition, it was concluded that there is a significant difference between teachers' digital literacy status and gender and age variables. According to the results obtained at the end of the study, suggestions for practitioners and researchers were presented. Keywords: Digital literacy, distance education, teacher attitudes