When Higher Education is Infected by Covid-19: An Analysis of the Experiences of Students and Academics in Distance Learning Activities during the Pandemic

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many sectors, especially the education and health sector, have encountered new urgencies that they had never experienced before. One domain most affected by the pandemic has been higher education. This study aims to evaluate the distance education activities that have occurred at higher education institutions in Turkey during the pandemic. The distance education experiences of 46 academics and 115 students of 10 universities in Turkey during the pandemic were surveyed through a question form. A qualitative research method, phenomenology, was adopted and the data were analyzed using the content analysis technique. The findings show that the distance education model presents both practical difficulties and advantages. The system can be improved by considering the results obtained from the experiences and detecting the deficiencies of distance education.