Distance education used to predominate mainly among adults and employed students, who were not able to attend studies on a regular basis. In order to prevent the spread of new coronavirus throughout Slovenia, all educational institutions were closed and distance education became the main teaching method in all Slovenian primary and secondary schools as well as universities. Teachers have faced a wide variety of challenges that were different from all they have faced before. Suddenly they had to change their method of teaching from a traditional one into a distance education.
In the theoretical part of master's thesis I first defined teaching and its tasks, teaching forms and methods and various theories of teaching. I described learning with the use of technology and then defined distance education. Aterwards I described the forms and methods of distance education, the advantages and disadvantages of distance education, flipped learning, and the possibilities of using flipped learning in distance education. Next I described the transition from traditional teaching to distance teaching and reviewed existing research on experieces of distance education. Lastly I described the changed role of teachers and students in distance education, assesment and grading with use of technology, how to prepare and design e-learning material and how a teacher can build student teacher relationships in distance education.
The empirical part of master's thesis includes results of a survey I conducted among primary and secondary school teachers. With the survey I wanted to discover opinions of primary and secondary school teachers about distance education and their experience and methods of teaching they used in distance teaching during the COVID-19 epidemic.
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