Current situation of online learning in Turkish higher education institutions: needs, problems, and possible solutions

In recent years, rapid improvements in science and technology have had an enormous impact on social life style. These developments also caused significant changes in generating, sharing, and transferring of information. The new situation required changes and updates in school curricula as well. In this new era, people's roles and responsibilities also have changed. In order to be effective members of society, individuals need to renew, update and develop themselves to cope with the changes occurred in many parts of the daily life. One of the outcomes of these changes is that use of information and communication technologies in education, which also brought the widespread use of online environments to make education available and reachable for everyone, increased. In addition, this lead people to distance education programs and online learning environments. The purpose of this research was to investigate the needs and problems of online education programs offered by Turkish universities. In addition some possible solutions for those problems were suggested. The study group was consisted of faculty members who were currently teaching or working in distance education programs. In order to collect data a survey was used. Findings revealed that the most common problems are related to pedagogical competence, technical issues, design and preparation of content and use of distance education systems. In order to have effective online learning programs, it can be suggested that an efficient feedback system need to be used, and technical and pedagogical support to faculty members in the preparation and design of contents should be provided.