Emergency Distance Education From the Perspective of a University During the COVID-19 Era: An Experience-Based Reflection

Handbook of Research on Establishing Digital Competencies in the Pursuit of Online Learning

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic, which emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and affected the whole world in a short time, is characterized as a social and economic crisis that causes fluctuations in all areas of life, especially in health, and has made it necessary to take some radical decisions. Although the pandemic, which brought life to a standstill, seems to be a financial crisis that mostly affected businesses due to the decline in trade globally in 2019 (Verma & Gustafsson, 2020), the effects of the pandemic were also felt deeply in education. While schools have closed completely in some countries around the world, face-to-face education has been suspended in some countries at the local, regional and state level (UNESCO, 2022). During the pandemic process, all stakeholders of education carried out various practices in order to ensure the continuity of education within the framework of the rules set by the policy-makers in the relevant settlement area. This situation brought up the concept of emergency distance education, which is defined as an instructional communication method born out of the necessity brought by the pandemic process (Bozkurt et al., 2020) and emergency distance education models started to be implemented rapidly in all age groups by employing various technologies.

From this point of view, it is aimed to share the reflections of an experience-based practice by considering the emergency distance education model adopted in a state university in Turkey during the pandemic process. In this context, the practice process of the model, the decisions taken in this process and the triggers of the decisions, the changes made, the problems encountered, the solution methods developed to solve these problems and the lessons learned were addressed. In addition, it is aimed to provide indicators for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in the field of distance education to determine future strategies by associating the inferences obtained in this process with the findings of the studies in the literature. As researchers who are in the kitchen of the business and experience this process from beginning to end, it is thought that it is important to criticize and share the practices in terms of being a guide for possible similar situations that may be encountered in the future.