A retrospective look towards the success of online education during Covid-19 shutdown in the eyes of the teachers

During the pandemic of 2020-2021 period face-to-face education was halted and a distance education period had started. Distance education was mainly conducted with computers, smartphones and tablets utilizing internet connections while being assisted by television. Research conducted during this era pointed out that while this distance education period had some problems like technological device accessibility or internet connection issues and some more, it overall achieved a satisfactory success. The next education year of 2021-2022 that followed this distance education period marked a return to face-to-face education. During this face-to-face education period, some teachers have expressed that they faced some issues that were not present in previous face-to-face education periods. Purpose of this research is to gather retrospective perspectives of teachers to assess their satisfaction regarding online education, to learn the problems they faced during distance education and to learn what kind of problems they have faced in post-pandemic face-to-face education period that they think was stemming from distance education period. It is also aimed to learn if there is a difference between problems participants expressed regarding regions they work, their ages, their experience in terms of years, their gender and school level they work at. This research was conducted by a 29-question quantitative questionnaire that was applied to 146 participants from all regions of Turkey, who had all features this research involved in different combinations, and a 6-question qualitative structured written interview form that was applied to 30 participants who again had different demographics that fit for aims of the research. Therefore, as a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this work is considered mixed-method research. According to results of this work, teachers have noted that there were technological issues like device availability and internet connections and overall, it was hard to conduct distance education, also teachers were not particularly satisfied of distance education. They also expressed that there were academic and behavioural problems that they think as based on distance education period and lockdowns.