January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

approach to delivering instruction, both formal and non-formal educational institutions all around the world and also
in Turkey have strikingly been engaged in DE. Although DE can be traced back fifty years in Turkey, it was first
mentioned in a meeting in 1927 as a means to increase the number of literate people (Alkan, 1987, p. 91).
Unfortunately, it was not applied in Turkey owing to the idea that education is not possible without a teacher and a
real classroom atmosphere. It appeared again in the 1970s with a closer meaning of distance education today. In
1982, the Council of Higher Education was established to plan, organise, administer, supervise and regulate all
higher education institutions in the country. Belatedly, within the same year, the Open Education Faculty (OEF) was
founded in Anadolu University, as it had sufficient infrastructure. Today, the OEF offers a great variety of
undergraduate degree programs to more than 750,000 Turkish students across Turkey, Cyprus and Europe (Demiray,
1998).
The Distance English Language Teaching (DELT) undergraduate program was established in 2000 with Basic
Education Law numbered 2547 to meet the great need for EFL teachers, especially in primary and secondary
schools. This was because English courses were integrated into their curricula in 2000. The DELT undergraduate
program lasts for four years and during the first two years, students are provided partially face-to-face instruction for
some basic courses such as contextual grammar, oral communication skills, advanced reading and writing, listening
and pronunciation and then they have distance education for the last two years. As Bates & Bates (2000) state, DE
programs worldwide use a range of technologies that include two-way interactive and one-way non-interactive
delivery of courses. Instruction in the distance higher education system in Turkey is based on textbooks, television,
CD-ROMs and radio broadcasts, which are, in general, one-way non-interactive delivery methods.
The aforementioned teacher training degree program offers three courses with respect to ICT implementation. Two
of them, Computer I and Computer II, aim to improve teacher candidates’ computer competency. The other,
Instructional Technology and Material Design, aims to teach them how to use ICT pedagogically in the language
teaching and learning processes. Nevertheless, the problem is that these courses are offered at distance through the
use of mostly printed materials. Thus, prospective EFL teachers do not have the opportunity to experience ICT which
is an inescapable component of powerful language learning and teaching. With this study, we aim to emphasize that
prospective EFL teachers at OEF need in-class experience with ICT to be convinced of its usefulness and educational
value.
Methodology
Sample characteristics
The study was conducted with the participation of 85 prospective EFL teachers in distance higher education in
Turkey. The participants were in the final year of a 4-year program leading to a bachelor’s degree in Teaching
English as a Foreign Language. When the participants had distance instruction during the 4th year of their education,
they were living in different regions of the country. Each participant was assigned a number during the data analysis
procedure because of ethical considerations and they were reminded that this research would not be used for any
assessment purposes and that personal details would be kept confidential. The demographic properties of the
participants are presented in Table 1.
Table 1. Demographic properties of the participants
Frequency Percentage (%)
Gender Male 23 27
Female 62 73
Age 20-22 17 20
23-24 52 61
25-above 16 19
Computer Yes 83 98
Literate No 2 2
TOTAL 85 100
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