Online course providers views towards online measurement and evaluation methods in Turkey

Disadvantages of formal education including specific time and place for instruction and limited number of instructors lead educators to conduct their lessons via online. Distance education is a critical opportunity for high quality education and lifelong learning. Previously, distance education was at mail-based form. As internet bandwidth increases and growing number of web tools that can be used for educational purposes, use of mail-based distance learning was supplanted by online distance education. Although formal education and online distance education have common components, there also exist sharp differences especially in evaluation. In other words, there are several approached and methods to evaluate learning outcomes in face to face and online settings. However, there are differences between these two forms of teaching. During online assessment and evaluation, these differences should be considered by lecturers. In this study, the goal is to investigate perspectives of instructors who give online lectures towards online assessment and evaluation. In order to design the instrument to use in this study, measurement and evaluation methods that Turkish instructors use in their online courses, their thoughts towards those methods and national and instructional studies were investigated. As a results, Online Measurement and Evaluation Methods Instructor Questionnaire was developed. The data were analyzed and the following critical findings were observed. When examined the number of courses each instructor provided and the total time of those courses, it is observed that those instructors did not have required experience in terms of providing online courses. Also, according to the results, participants held positive attitude towards evaluation methods in distance education. However, they have limited knowledge in terms of alternative measurement and evaluation methods. Keywords: Distance Education, Assessment and Evaluation, Online Assessment and Evaluation