The role of the universities has been changing enormously during the last century. Traditionally, universities are bound to teaching and research activities. Teaching includes discussing and transferring existing theories, research, and knowledge. On the other hand, research refers to developing new information and understanding. In modern society, the role of the universities is starting to be questioned within the 21st century (Barnett, 2008, 2010; Collini, 2012; Sperlinger, McLellan & Pettigrew, 2018). As a result of this debate, a new term emerged as a responsibility of universities to contribute to societal and economic development (Laredo, 2007; Zomer & Benneworth, 2011).
While the number of Covid-19 cases is increasing day by day, higher education institutes in almost every country, including Turkey, have started to obtain a distance learning approach. This transition required a new perspective on higher education itself (Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020). There was a significant migration from face-to-face learning to online learning methods because of the Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020. UNESCO (2020) reported that 1 576, 021, 818 learners in 188 countries were affected by this migration to online learning at all levels. While the universities start online education, ambiguity arose about what to teach and how to teach. Furthermore, there is a considerable gap growing about education equity with online education (Zhang, Wang, Yang & Wang, 2020). Thus, it affected 99 percent of the students worldwide (UNESCO, 2020).
In the 21st century, there has been more online training, seminars, and workshops carried out, and these activities require planning, audiovisual contents, and teacher-student preparation for the online process (Bao, 2020). On the other hand, most of the academics were unprepared for the online teaching process because of the sudden outbreak. They lacked the online teaching experience and support from the technology teams. In the first place, Turkey announced a break for three weeks in March and hoped to be prepared for the virus in this break (YÖK, 2020). On the other hand, since the pandemic was growing, education and training activities were held online. Therefore, this process should be considered an emergency remote education rather than distance learning (Bozkurt, 2020).
Although online education has become a necessary action and has enormous benefits to maintain learning by preserving physical distance during a pandemic, it gives rise to significant difficulties and shortcomings about the effectiveness of education. Inadequate infrastructure, lack of technological devices because of socio-economic status, difficulties about technological competence of instructors, inappropriate curriculum and assessment tools for online systems are disadvantages of distance learning (Dumford and Miller, 2018; Owusu-Fordjour, Koomson and Hanson, 2020). Students couldn’t reach the online classes and stated their situations to their universities. Most of the universities, such as Middle East Technical University and Boğaziçi University in Turkey, started to run campaigns for students who did not have access to the internet and a personal computer.
This outbreak influences every area of our life certainly. Furthermore, this process requires a reassessment of higher education tools and activities. This study aimed to learn the experiences of the academics who are currently giving lectures and running a laboratory during the outbreak. In addition, it is intended to get information about the personal experiences of the academic to come to know the effects of personal experiences on their professional life as well. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with the academicians following this purpose.