Teachers' Perspectives on the Use of Virtual Informal Environments in the COVID-19 Pandemic Process

Abstract

The COVID-19 Pandemic has shown its effectiveness in many areas of life. Education is at a critical point for the future of the country in these fields. A need occurred for student-centered teaching activities to make distance education more effective. “Informal Teaching Environments” activities are appropriate opportunities to meet this need also they affect students positively in numerous affairs. The use of "Virtual Informal Environments" (VIE) is important during the COVID-19 Pandemic process. The purpose of this research is to examine the teaching processes of teachers using VIEs during the COVID-19 Pandemic and to make general judgements in the context of teaching processes using VIEs according to their status of taking or not taking courses on teaching in informal environments. In the study, the "Descriptive Research Method" was used. The study group of the research consists of 93 teachers and it was determined by using the "Easy Access Sampling" method. Eight open-ended question forms were applied to the participants. The data were evaluated with the “Content Analysis Method”. In the research, it was resulted that the informal science education (ISE) course-taken teachers used VIEs more and more consciously than the participants who have not taken any course. By focusing on the achievements in the curriculum, teachers planned the use of VIEs and integrated these environments by adopting a student-centered approach into their lessons. In the evaluation studies after the teaching activities using VIEs, it was concluded that they tend to evaluate the achievements, not the learning process.

Keywords

• informal learning environments
• virtual informal learning environments
• teacher’s perspective
• covid-19 pandemic