International Higher Education Congress: New Trends and Issues, Turkey, vol.II, pp.1466-1474, (Full Text)
In today’s global and rapidly changing world, educational systems have become differentiated and in response to the changing needs of students, academic world works to meet their expectations. There have been substantial developments in the field of higher education over the years and recently, the rapid development of technology and the increasing use of internet, distance education started to gain popularity all over the world. In order to keep up with this rapidly changing world, Istanbul University started distance education in the period of 2009-2010.
Purposes of this research are: to examine historical development, evaluation and transformation of distance education and its application in Turkey. Furthermore, to explain an innovative university’s adoption process of distance education is the other objective of this study. To this end, we addressed Istanbul University as an innovative university, in order to evaluate distance education in Istanbul University the authors have interviewed with the coordinators and administrators of distance education. SWOT analysis is one of the ways to evaluate the current situation. For that purpose, the authors have interviewed with those concerned, and revealed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats then discussed possible tasks incumbent on faculty members and universities. This study tries to bring solutions on the issue.
Key words: Distance education, history of education types, innovative university.