A Comparative Examination of Faculty Members’ and Students’ Meanings Regarding Emergency Remote Teaching in the COVID-19 Process

Examining the perceptions of faculty members and university students in the emergency remote teaching process can create an important opportunity to understand the difficulties of the education processes during the COVID-19 pandemic and to conduct the next education processes more effectively. For this reason, this study aims to determine the perspectives of university students and faculty members about emergency remote teaching by examining their metaphorical interpretations of their short-term experiences with emergency remote teaching. The research was carried out using a qualitative research approach and the basic interpretive design was used in the research process. The data were collected with an online opinion form prepared to give a detailed meaning to the experiences of 152 university students and 48 faculty members. While analyzing the research data, the inductive analysis approach was employed with a phenomenological perspective. As a result of the research, it was understood that 65% of the faculty members and 46% of the students preferred coeducation, whereas 7.5% of the students preferred only the online environment. One of the most striking findings of the study is that students view AUE as freedom, whilst faculty members see it as a savior. Another significant conclusion is that both academic staff and students view the blended learning model as a long-term solution. Due to this, concerns about how online learning environment design procedures are implemented in emergency remote learning processes should be raised. Design studies on how to carry out distance education after the pandemic become more important given that the research's findings indicate that emergency distance education will be a permanent part of our life.