Determining the Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions on Distance Education by Metaphors

Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine teachers candidates’ perceptions on ‘distance education’ via metaphors. The sample consisted of 150 teacher candidates’ drawn from departments of science teacher and primary teacher at Faculty of Education in Bayburt University. 70 of the sample are primary teacher candidates that attended courses via distance education in their undergraduate programme. 80 of them are science teacher candidates that took ‘distance education’ elective course. To collect the data the teacher candidates’ were asked to complete this sentence: ‘Distance education is like......because....’. Data was analysed by using content analysis technique one of the qualitative data analysis methods. The results indicate that the teacher candidates’ metaphors referred to such different issues as need-aimed, variety, arbitrary, requirement. Moreover, when the findings are searched, it was determined that the primary teacher candidates take lesson by means of synchron distance education have more negative perception in contrast with science teacher candidates. It was noticed that some factors such as carrying out the synchron distance lessons as 90 min blocks, no chance to ask any question to the teacher out of the lesson time, occasionally encountering technical problems in the lesson causes the negative perception. To develop positive perception about synchron distance education, it is suggested that some distance education conditions which allows communication between students and teachers out of the lesson time should be designed as minimising the technical problems and informing to the participants about distance education applications.