ABSTRACT
Education has gone through rapid changes during the emergency remote teaching period resulting by the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes, in part, have been associated with educational institutions attempting to implement a viable solution to the problem of distance education. Although organizational management theory literature suggests that great change in very little time results in a detrimental psychological phenomenon called change fatigue in employees and that this phenomenon has even been investigated in the context of teaching staff in the past;there have been no attempt at understanding change fatigue from a student perspective. This quantitative study attempts at proposing a structural equation model towards the understanding of how to change fatigue and other variables, namely, digital literacy, online learning attitude and school alienation that might have been influenced by it have affected teacher candidates after resuming face-to-face education followed by a 1.5 year of emergency remote teaching period. Results indicated that change fatigue predicts school alienation and yet;does not predict online learning attitude;hinting that there might be another category of alienating organizational change that universities have gone through that does not solely involve online education. Nevertheless, digital literacy is a beneficial skill for all students that helps bolster online learning attitudes and reduce overall school alienation.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to describe the negative experiences encountered by in-service K12 teachers in Turkey with respect to distance education practices applied urgently and compulsorily during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Analyses have been carried out on responses of teachers in order to determine the factors affecting them, so as to illustrate an example and to try to understand the impacts of decisions taken by the Turkish Ministry of National Education during the initial stages of the pandemic. The study follows a descriptive survey model and employs quota sampling based on the first level Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics of Turkey. 1071 teachers participated in the study on a voluntary basis during the 30 March-1 June 2020 period by filling out a questionnaire form developed by the researchers. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data were carried out via SPSS 24 and NVIVO 10 software, respectively. Findings indicate the most prominent problems reported by teachers are the lack of internet/device access by students as well as lack of experience of teachers with distance education. Analyses of problem frequency based on demographics have revealed that female teachers were more likely to suffer from the lack of IT skills. Teachers in the age group of 41+, who belong to generation X, also tend to experience more problems due to the lack of IT skills in comparison with their younger peers. Moreover, issues such as internet and infrastructure inadequacies experienced in rural regions, low participation rate of students in the online courses, indifference of parents, and failure of teachers to be sufficiently active in the system, were considered as problems by the teachers;and solution suggestions have been presented accordingly.