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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADISSENSE OF COMMUNITY FEELING IN A BLENDEDLEARNING ENVIRONMENT:EFFECT OF DEMOGRAPHICSHale Ilgaz* and Petek Aşkar***Ankara University** Hacettepe UniversityAnkara, TurkiyeABSTRACTIn distance education in which online communication technologies have played an important role, the communicationsbetween students and teachers, development of community feeling are crucial for sociality. The satisfaction of a studentwho feels himself/herself as isolated from the system, will tend to decrease through program and this affects his/herlearning. This situation may result with the student dropping out the program. Providing interaction with informationcommunication technologies come into prominence as a result of increasing importance of these technologies in distanceeducation. Although this situation has positive contributions, it may have negative effects on decrement of themotivation, achievement, satisfaction or learning of student such as social isolation, aprosexia, and feeling of alienation.The aim of this study is to analyze the development status of community feelings of students who have enrolled in adistance education program which is configured on a blended learning model, in terms of age, gender, access tocomputer, access to Internet and period of computer usage. The analyses were carried on the data obtained from the scalewhich administered to 676 freshman student. Results showed that students’ community feelings have significantdifferences in terms of gender, access to computers and access to Internet. However there is no significant difference interms of age and period of computer usage.KEYWORDSCommunity feeling, blended learning, distance education1. INTRODUCTIONBy the increases in demand to the education, information and communication technologies had a veryimportant position in people’s life. According to the annual analyze reports which were prepared by NCES(1999), Internet technologies were confirmed as the most rapid developing communication tools in distanceeducation after high school. The distance education which is performed due to information andcommunication technologies has become an opportunity for people who can not take education due tobarriers related to time or place.The communications between student and teachers and the ability of developing of community feeling aresocially essentials in distance education in which individuals are separated physically. The satisfaction of astudent who feels himself/herself as isolated from the system, will decrease through program and he/she cannot obtain sufficient learning. This situation may end up with the student dropping the program.Researches have shown that drop-out rates tend to be higher in distance education programs than intraditional face-to-face programs (Rovai, 2001). Although the distance education intends to correspond to theneeds of individuals and has a lot of advantages, it became necessary to analyze the increase in the drop-outrates. Despite a lot of advantages of distance education, intended to correspond to people’s needs, reasons ofdrop out must be searched. The research results showed that the factors like expectations are unfulfilled,dissatisfaction, loss of motivation, inadequacy of interaction affect the drop-out rates.According to Brown and Duguid (1996) when enrolled in distance education programs, studentparticipation in institutional life is often limited and may consist of infrequent residencies with little face-tofacecontact with other students, professors, and administrators, thus limiting the true involvement of distance262