The Metaphors Ascribed to the Concepts “Online Course”, “Computer”, “Instructor”, and “Learner” by PhD Candidates Taking Online Courses

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As it is all over the world also in Turkey online education became widespread. Anadolu University is one of the universities which serves online education courses especially in higher education in Turkey. “Development and Learning” and “Planning and Evaluation in Instruction” are the two of the online courses aim to teach basic instructional information and skills to PhD candidates both in Anadolu University and other universities in Turkey. Both of these courses are carried out via WebCT. “Development and Learning” course has an non-interactive teaching-learning process. Students just have work sheets for every chapter and are responsible to take a quiz for each of them. On the other hand, “Planning and Evaluation in Instruction” course has an interactive teaching-learning process in which synchronous and asynchronous group discussions are carried out in each week of the term. In this study, the aim is to determine the opinions of PhD candidates who enrolled in these courses, regarding online courses and their components by defining the metaphors they ascribe for “online course”, “computer”, “instructor”, and “learner”. PhD candidates will get fill in the blanks of the sentences for each of the concepts like “Online course is ........................ Because...............” and outputs will analyzed via content analysis. It is expected that the findings of this study would help to plan and construct more effective teaching-learning processes in online courses.

Stream: Curriculum and Pedagogy; Student Learning, Learner Experiences, Learner Diversity

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I am currently a research assistant and a PhD student of Curriculum and Instruction Program at Anadolu University in Turkey. At the moment, I am working on the following: "learning resistance", “effective science and technology teaching”; “a selection of science curriculum” and “new teaching approaches”. My academic background includes: a BSc in “Teaching Science” within the Science Education Faculty from Middle East Technical University in 2003; followed by an MSc (MA) in Curriculum and Instruction Anadolu University in 2006.