Introduction
On December 31st, 2019, China reported the discovery of a new type of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pneumonia-like infection to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, which caused serious illnesses and death (Yuan et al.,
2020). By January 2020, the fact that the COVID-19 infection became a pandemic affecting more than 160 countries in a few weeks left the whole world to confront with a global problem. Since the coronavirus was spreading very quickly and was lethally dangerous in certain age groups and/or people with pre-existing medical conditions, the whole world took extensive measures such as the rapid closure of many workplaces and educational institutions following the spread of the virus. Many countries including Turkey decided to shut down K-12 schools and universities temporarily and continue educational activities through distance education. Higher education institutions, academic staff and students tried to adapt to this mandatory decision in a short time (Huang et al.,
2020a,
b). In this process, universities with reliable infrastructure continued through distance education systems, completed the 2019–2020 Spring semester, and planned to complete 2020–2021 Fall and Spring semesters in this way.
Audrey Azoulay, the Director-General of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) stated that “We entered a region without a map, that is, the borders have been crossed.”, referring to the distance education (Huang, et al.,
2020a,
b). As the educational, scientific, and cultural organization of United Nations, UNESCO’s publications, and guidance gain importance in the times of such global crises. In this process, it was emphasized that all countries should work together to find high-tech, low-tech and non-technology solutions to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning (Huang, et al.,
2020a,
b). Tamrat and Teferra (
2020) stated that universities should focus on the long-term higher education plans while concurrently working on the crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic distance education. However, according to Tamrat and Teferra (
2020) African higher education institutions were late to act both regionally and nationally. The report published by the OECD (
2020) revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, educators and administrators of educational institutions had insufficiencies in areas such as distance education, composing online classes, and supporting students. In addition, higher education institutions and their stakeholders around the world constituted one of the groups most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Crawford et al.,
2020).
In more than 85% of all countries, schools were shut down completely or gradually, meaning that schools have been no longer accessible for more than 1.6 billion students (on April 10, 2020). According to the study conducted with high school principals in 82 countries participating in the International Student Assessment Program (PISA), the rate of students and teachers using those platforms is between 35 and 70% even in schools with an effective online learning platform (The World Bank Education Global Practice,
2020a,
b). The rates and the cases were similar to the above-mentioned World Bank data in Turkish higher education institutions. Although the Council of Higher Education (COHE) allowed up to 30% of the courses in undergraduate and graduate programs to be delivered through distance education with various regulations and directives, this rate did not exceed 5% in universities prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The practices and encouragement of the COHE are very important indicators of supporting education with online procedures in the days when access to educational institutions is limited. However, it should be considered that the situation is much worse in middle and low-income countries where the rate of access to the internet is generally less than 50% and the rate of students who do not have any tools that enable online learning at home is high. For this reason, some countries turned to low-tech options such as television and radio to increase access to distance learning significantly (The World Bank Education Global Practice,
2020a). With the change from in-person education to distance education to stop the spread of the coronavirus, students who were living in regions with low-quality internet access and/or with low internet quotas were affected seriously. Some countries tried to overcome this problem by providing free internet service to students (Tamrat & Teferra,
2020).
Along with the whole world, Turkey had to resort to distance education. First, as of March 16, 2020, in-person education was suspended for three weeks in all primary, secondary and high schools, and higher education institutions. In addition, the COHE (YÖK,
2020a) decided to suspend the in-person classes for the associate and undergraduate students during this three-week period. As the number of COVID-19 cases increased rapidly, it was understood that the pandemic would last longer than expected. COHE announced that educational activities would be maintained through distance education, open education, and digital teaching tools and techniques on March 26, 2020 (YÖK,
2020b).
Turkey had an opportunity to take necessary precautions and get ready for distance education as the first cases were detected later than many European countries. In addition to this, thanks to the distance education infrastructure and experience, universities were expected to manage this crisis by putting this previously built capacity into action. In this respect, the pandemic has shown the competence levels of universities in the Turkish higher education system in several areas such as the management of distance education, digital tools and technical infrastructure competence, proficiency of instructors, and the quality of teaching materials. The evaluation of student experience in higher education is linked to the evaluation of the services and facilities at universities (Lin et al.,
2020). Distance education which brings together many concepts such as digital learning, e-learning and mobile learning (Basak et al.,
2018) has become popular in US higher education recently (Allen and Seaman, 2014). Similarly, distance education capacity plays an important role in the quality of distance education and student satisfaction. However, education literature needs more studies on student satisfaction in distance education.
However, many challenges were encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of the shortcoming’s stem from the transition to the distance education system in a short time, a significant part of them stemmed from the inadequacies of the universities’ capacities, the lack of adaptation of the faculty members and also from the students’ lack of the necessary technologic tools. In this context, in-depth examination of distance education in higher education will contribute to the development of the higher education system, to receive feedback on the education services provided and to increase the quality of education services, as well as to draw roadmaps on how to continue higher education in COVID-19 and different pandemic and emergency situations. In addition, the evaluation of distance education in universities during the COVID-19 pandemic will shape the level of technology integration of lecturers and students’ expectations and experiences. Based on this background, the main purpose of this study is “to determine and evaluate the distance education capacities of universities, acceptance and use of distance education systems of faculty members and the satisfactions levels of students”. The following sections gives a detailed literature review and links this background to the research questions of the study.
Conceptual framework and the research questions
Satisfaction is a structure related to the evaluation of perceived inconsistencies between expectations for a product or service and the results (feeling and feedback) after the product or service was used (Oliver,
1981). Elliot and Healy (
2001) define the concept of student satisfaction as an attitude resulting from the evaluation of experiences, services, and opportunities (Lin et al.,
2020). Student satisfaction has become an important target for higher education (Guo,
2016). In recent years, researchers began to approach student satisfaction as a way of evaluating the overall performance of universities (Martirosyan,
2015). In addition, the strategic and economic importance of satisfaction studies in higher education, in various research areas such as state universities (Gruber et al.,
2010), private institutions (Arif et al.,
2013), e-learning programs (Sun et al.,
2008), graduate programs (Carter,
2009), and extension programs (Marzo-Navarro et al.,
2005) attracted the attention of academics and management.
Questionnaires are widely used to evaluate the satisfaction levels of students (Yorke,
2009). The oldest of those is the College Student Satisfaction Questionnaire (CCSQ), which was developed by Starr et al., (
1971) and includes five indicators covering all aspects of the university life of students in the USA. The most widely used survey for student satisfaction in the UK is the National Student Survey (NSS) conducted by Ipsos MORI (Thiel,
2019). NSS consists of 27 questions with a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”, which is administered to all senior undergraduate students. Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) (Griffin et al.,
2003; McInnis et al.,
2001) and Student Experience Survey (SES) (Morgan et al.,
2018) used in Australia focus on different aspects of the student experience that may be measurable and potentially related to learning and development outcomes. CEQ measures five aspects of student experience: skill development, student engagement, teaching quality, student support, and learning resources. The theoretical framework of the study was based on this satisfaction and student experience literature. The data collection tools to evaluate student satisfaction were prepared based on the CEQ (McInnis et al.,
2001) and NSS (National Student Survey, 2020) in student satisfaction literature; however, the rapid changes during the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a special approach and special items in the questionnaire.
The most commonly used measure of student satisfaction in Turkey is Turkey University Satisfaction Survey (TUSS) carried out by University Assessments & Research Laboratory (UniAR) established in 2016 (Karadağ & Yücel,
2020a). The survey used in the TUSS consists of 60 Likert-type scale questions with an answering scale ranging from 1–10 and is administered to undergraduate students in all grade levels of all universities in Turkey. TUSS focuses on six aspects of student satisfaction: satisfaction in the learning experience, satisfaction in the campus and campus life, academic support and interest, satisfaction with the management and operation of the institution, wealth of learning opportunities and resources, and personal development and career support. Results obtained from TUSS have a great impact on institutional reputation and good results are used for marketing and public relations purposes. One of the main functions of TUSS and similar national student satisfaction surveys is to provide prospective students with information that will help them choose their university (Canning,
2015).
The abundance of research on satisfaction in higher education institutions in recent years and the various methodological approaches used in previous studies make it difficult to choose among various options for measuring structures related to satisfaction. Moreover, there are an excessive number of questionnaire structures (premises and conclusions) which are associated with satisfaction in higher education (Sultan & Yin Wong,
2014). Although there are a significant number of publications on this subject, the results of these studies are complicated and they differ in statistical significance, direction and even size (Yavaş & Babakus,
2010). For example, there is a negative relationship between the content of a course and student satisfaction in China (Liu,
2012), while in Romania (Munteanu et al.,
2010), United Arab Emirates (Wilkins & Stephens-Balakrishnan,
2013) and Armenia (Martirosyan,
2015) a positive relationship was found. Again, Ledden and Kalafatis (
2010) and Clemes et al. (
2008) found a high level (r > 0.67) correlation between satisfaction and recommendation intention in higher education institutions, while Athiyaman (
1997) did not observe a relationship. In addition, it is documented in the relevant literature that when it is more difficult to evaluate the quality of educational services, the effect of expectations in the reaching satisfaction will be more difficult. (Anderson & Sullivan,
1993; Yi,
1993).
Another focus of the study was to investigate the distance education capacities of the universities. The comprehensive distance education and technology infrastructure standards were taken as the foundation to analyze the distance education capacities of Turkish universities (Bergeron & Fornero,
2018; Moore and Fodrey (
2018). Piña (
2018) also recommended assessing the infrastructure and capacity of the institution as a starting place to improve distance education, which resonated with the current study. Moore & Fodrey state that the critical components of the technological infrastructure are systems, objectives, personnel, and evaluation. Therefore, this study focused on analyzing the capacity of universities using this framework as a foundation. On the other hand, technology has changed the way educators teach and the way students learn because it has the potential to improve students’ learning experience (Glover et al.,
2016). With the increasing use of mobile devices among students, particularly generation Y, traditional ways of providing learning materials through learning management systems are becoming less useful in creating effective learning environments, as they have limitations such as being less learner-centered and allowing only certain activities (Yasar & Adıgüzel,
2010). Although higher education institutions commonly use learning management systems (LMS) to facilitate student learning, most of the teacher-centered higher education institutions fail to offer LMS’s along with Web 2.0 features such as effective distance education and dynamic content (Anderson & Dron,
2017). Universities have not actively embraced distance education systems despite the benefits gained from the use of these modes of instruction. Based on this background, the current study was conducted to better understand distance education satisfaction of students in the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, the research question (RQ) below was examined in this study:
The main factors affecting student satisfaction are the quality of teaching in the classroom, the quality of feedback given to students, and student-faculty relations in the classroom (Hill et al.,
2003; Siming, et al.,
2015). Students are more likely to be satisfied if faculty members can effectively involve students in teaching activities. The more engaged students are in learning, the more likely they are to learn and be satisfied (Jankowski,
2017). In summary, since the success of students is largely dependent on the teaching attitude of the instructor and the effectiveness of teaching materials and technology, it is very important that faculty members adopt teaching practices that create such learning environments. For this reason, the research questions below were tested:
Conclusion
Students’ satisfaction with the distance education processes carried out at universities during the COVID-19 pandemic was examined in this study. We found that students’ satisfaction levels were low. In addition, the distance education capacities of the universities and the acceptance and use of the distance education systems of the faculty members were found to have a significant positive effect on the overall satisfaction scores of the students. The following table shows a summary of the results relating to the research questions (Table
8).
Table 8
Summary of test results
RQ1 | Satisfaction with distance education | Low |
RQ2.a | Student Features → General Satisfaction | Positive |
RQ2.b | University Features → General Satisfaction | Positive |
RQ3 | Distance Education Judgment | Low |
According to the results of this study, 80% of the students followed their distance education lessons from their computers, 57% from their smart phones and 4% from their tablets. In addition, one out of every five students (20%) did not have a computer. In the study, 83% of the students had Wi-Fi connection. This rate was 63% in a comprehensive study conducted by Karadağ and Yücel (
2020b) on April 1–4, 2020. The reasons for students’ missing distance education courses were as follows: limited internet packages (20%), lack of internet access where they were located (8%), and no technological tools to access the internet (3%). The frequency of students who missed their lessons due to the lack of technological tools (computer, tablet, etc.) was lower than the study of Karadağ and Yücel (
2020b). The comparative results indicate that, a significant portion of the students arranged Wi-Fi connection and technological tools during the 3-month period between these two studies. Another similar study conducted with 2781 students (Kırşehir Ahi Evran University,
2020) showed that 23% of the students could not attend online courses. Besides, together with the results of the previous studies, this study showed obviously that distance education additional cellular data quota provided by some of the universities and COHE (YÖK,
2020c) was a beneficial and to-the-point practice.
Discussion
According to the findings of the current study, the results of the RQ
1. show that the students were dissatisfied with distance education in the COVID-19 pandemic. With regard to the satisfaction dimensions, students were satisfied only with the decisions taken by the COHE during the pandemic. In contrast, dissatisfaction in other areas was expected. Even though the distance education and open course materials had a wide coverage and many universities claimed ensuring an effective transition to digitalization, there are studies indicating that this is not realistic (Karadağ & Yücel,
2020b). Effendi, Sugandini and Istanto (
2020) argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating social media adaptation and digitalization. However, many studies on the COVID-19 pandemic, distance education and remote work processes reveal critical results. Kedraka and Kaltsidis (
2020) state that there are no problems in terms of adaptation due to the age of students and their openness to technology, but the overall satisfaction with distance education processes is low for various reasons. Similarly, Allo (
2020) found that despite receiving some positive feedback from students, many deficiencies and complaints regarding distance education satisfaction were expressed. He claimed that students in Indonesia found offline methods more effective in the earlier days of the pandemic and stated that learning management systems were used later. It also revealed that practices such as internet quotas constitute one of the major obstacles (Wargadinata et al.,
2020). For this reason, the findings obtained in the study are compatible with the literature.
The study results on RQ
2a and RQ
2b indicated the distance education capacity of universities and the level of acceptance and use of distance education systems by faculty members had a positive effect on general satisfaction of the students. Similar results were reported in the literature, especially in studies examining the effect of distance education systems. Another study which used the same model (UTAUT) and examined the same variables as this study revealed that students’ technology acceptance and use and perceptions on the faculty’s technology competencies affected students’ distance education satisfaction (Alshare & Lane,
2011). DeBourgh (
1999) stated that the lecturer and the method of teaching contributed to the explanation of the variance in student satisfaction in a program conducted interactively with various methods. In terms of teaching staff and teaching processes, it is reported that explicit expectations regarding the studies and the immediate response and feedback to students’ questions are directly related to student satisfaction. Kane et al. (
2016) revealed that students’ satisfaction with their faculty members who participated in online education processes increased over time. In other words, as a faculty member continues her/his development within the distance education system, student satisfaction with this specific faculty member increases. In this case, it is accurate to say that as the faculty members gain more experience and manage their online education processes better, they provide higher satisfaction. Aman (
2009), on the other hand, conducted an experimental study evaluating the change in student satisfaction over time when the faculty members gave feedback to each other in online education. As a result of the study, a significant increase in student satisfaction was found in the group where faculty members gave feedback by watching each other’s courses. Therefore, it can be stated that increasing the competence of faculty members in distance education through various methods will contribute to student satisfaction.
Also, the fact that the students had distance education experiences before the pandemic affected the students’ satisfaction positively. There are three main indicators of pre-pandemic distance education experience. The first is that the universities with a pre-pandemic distance education experience have a more advanced distance education capacity and experience. Secondly, the students at these universities are used to the distance education system, lesson preparation, exams, materials and most importantly, and they have the technological tools. Lastly, many faculty members and lecturer at these universities have distance education experience. The intersection of these three indicators helps the universities overcome the chaos caused by quick transition to distance education during Covid-19 pandemic and increases the level of satisfaction by accelerating the adaptation. Similarly, satisfaction is higher especially in universities and faculties where lessons are conducted synchronously. This result is also consistent with previous findings.
Various studies on distance education also reveal that experience with technological tools and internet self-efficacy positively affect the distance education experiences of students and thus their satisfaction (Kuo et al.,
2013). In this context, Kuo et al. (
2013) stated that students with high internet self-efficacy have a more advanced ability to search and access information. So, it will be beneficial for institutions to provide students with training and studies that will improve these skills and self-efficacy in order to improve students’ online experiences and satisfaction. Kırmızı (
2015), on the other hand, evaluated the effects of students’ readiness in higher education on their satisfaction in an online program. The study revealed that there is a positive relationship between computer/internet self-efficacy and satisfaction. In their comprehensive study on online learning outcomes, Chu and Chu (
2010) evaluated the relationship between various structures. In this study, it is revealed that peer support affected internet self-efficacy, and internet self-efficacy also positively affected learning outcomes. It is accurate to conclude that the mutual interaction between these structures increases students’ online learning satisfaction. Therefore, the fact that universities and students have distance education experience is seen as a factor that will contribute to students’ achieving more efficient results from distance education processes and their satisfaction.
The results of this study indicate clearly that Turkish universities were unsuccessful in managing distance education in COVID-19 pandemic. The main problems were inadequacies of the universities’ infrastructure, delay in adaptation of the faculty members, failure to evaluate and answer the problems of the students on time, failure to provide the necessary guidance at the right time, and the problems of students in accessing technological devices and the internet. We can infer from the results that universities are not prepared enough for the distance education and they have not been able to achieve the criteria determined by COHE. Based on these results and the inability to adapt to the distance education, it will not be accurate to expect the Turkish higher education system to be able to teach in digital environments (Karadağ & Yücel,
2020b). Lastly, the results on students’ judgements related to their distance education experiences give the signs of the future problems.
According to the results of the study, universities in Turkey and around the world should increase their distance education capacity without depending on any reason such as COVID-19 pandemic or another emergency, and faculty members should increase their digital competencies. As the learning environments change rapidly, planning focuses on this change and transition. The continuity of planning learning processes includes not only the technologies that the higher education institution will utilize to continue education, but also how students will return to campus after the emergency is over (International Baccalaureate Organization,
2020). For this reason, there is still further need for a multidimensional examination of the current distance education processes and data on the competencies and needs of the students to return to the campus at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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