Background: Although distance education is used as an education method from time to time, it has started to be used as a more compulsory method due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Opinions and attitudes towards distance education may change due to differences in education and technical infrastructure between countries. This difference may also differ between faculties in universities. This study aimed to evaluate the attitudes of the students studying at the medical faculty in Turkey towards distance education and the factors affecting these attitudes.
Methods: 490 volunteer students studying at various medical faculties in Turkey were included in the study. Attitudes of students towards distance education with Online Learning Attitude Scale; Other variables that may affect their attitudes were evaluated through the sociodemographic form and questions prepared by the researchers about distance education, and it was applied to the students through an online questionnaire.
Results: It has been found that students studying in medical school have an almost neutral attitude towards distance education. While the flexibility of time and space, the ease of following the lessons, the convenience of disadvantaged students, the environmental friendliness and the increase in attendance are seen as the advantages of distance education; disadvantages of distance education were found to be difficulties in focusing on the screen and motivating to the lectures, creating difficulties in self-control to attend the lectures, technological problems, low interaction during the lectures, feeling isolated and having difficulty in finding a suitable place to participate in the lectures. Technological problems (internet connection, power shortage, etc.), some courses not suitable for distance education in terms of content, and the lack of technical knowledge and skills of instructors regarding distance education are seen as obstacles to the effective implementation of distance education. Although more than half of the students think that distance education reduces their academic success, only 5% of them stated that they want to study only with distance education in the following years.
Conclusions: Although distance education activities have various advantages, in the current study, medical faculty students; It was seen that they mostly thought that it reduced their academic success and a very small part of them wanted to continue their education with distance education only. Because of technological improvements, it can be predicted that distance education which have been used more actively with the COVID-19 pandemic, can be implemented more frequently in the future. Therefore, It is thought that it would be beneficial to consider it as a holistic approach in order to organize the curriculum, train the instructors and provide access to distance education in order to implement the education-teaching activities more efficiently.
