INVESTIGATION OF THE NEW PARADIGM IN EFL USING SYSTEMS APPROACH: A MIXED METHOD DISTANCE EDUCATION PROGRAM EVALUATION STUDY

Abstract

Although some education institutions have implemented open education or online education in line with their own needs, distance education did not have national recognition until the pandemic that swept the world at the beginning of 2020. After this date, many education institutions had undergone changes from classical face-to-face education to distance education. For this reason, this simultaneous explanatory mixed method study was conducted to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of distance education program of an English language institution situated in the northern part of Turkey. Five English language instructors and 403 English preparatory students five of whom were also interviewed participated in this study. ‘Distance Education System Evaluation Scale (DESES)’, semi-structured interviews, observational journals and institutional documents are used as data collection tools. The results of quantitative data show that students are mostly satisfied with instructors and least satisfied with the content of the program. Moreover, it is found out that students with higher grades gave high scores to DESES. On the other hand, from the results of qualitative data, while it is understood that the program was criticized negatively in terms of socialization, technical problems, moods, pacing schedule, registration, attendance, feedback, assessment, language skills and distance education pedagogy; positive themes emerged as time and expenses, technical infrastructure, instructors and psychological factors. The results show that there are many issues that need to be considered for distance education implementations and pedagogy.