TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT IN DISTANCE EDUCATION

Abstract

Distance education systems have become a part of education and have been used in a compulsory way during the pandemic. Distance education systems, which fully incorporate technology among education models, have also brought about the problems regarding how to manage them. How teachers will behave in these systems, where to get help and how to guide students are among the issues that need to be investigated. The researcher prepared an item pool related to technology management in the distance education process for teachers. 20 teachers, who were expert in their fields, evaluated the item pool, and 5 questions were removed from the questionnaire. Some items in the questionnaire were corrected, and the final form of the questionnaire consisted of 20 questions. The questionnaire included demographic questions regarding the gender, age, working years and administrative duties of the participants. SPSS 25 was used in the analysis of the data. A total of 724 participants filled the questionnaire. Due to the difficulties in reaching teachers during the pandemic, the study employed the deliberate sampling method. In order to see whether the obtained data was at a sufficient level, the researcher checked kmo coefficient, and the results yielded a coefficient value of 0.857. This Kmo coefficient value revealed that the obtained data was sufficient. Then, the researcher performed a factor analysis and reduced the number of items to 12 items and determined 3 factors. The researcher named these factors as Readiness, Technology, and Efficiency, respectively. The variances of each factor were calculated and the cumulative variance was found to be 66.58%. This value is quite good in explaining the measurement tool of the factors. The researcher believes that this scale is a reliable and valid scale for conducting field research according to factors such as what teachers’ pay attention to in technology management, how ready they are in the use of technology or how their readiness will be measured, and how technology management will affect teachers.