Online education is one of the most dynamic and enriched forms of learning available today. The aim of the present study is to reveal the self-regulated learning levels of pre-service teacher and to determine whether these levels change in terms of their gender and class. The sample of the study consists of Aksaray University Educational Sciences Department students who received online education due to the COVID-19 global epidemic in the 2020-2021 academic year. The data of the study were collected with the “Self-Regulation in Self-Paced Open and Distance Learning Environments Scale.” The first result of the study revealed that the self-regulated learning levels of the participants were close to medium. The self-regulation scores of male students receiving online education at university were also found to be significantly higher than the scores of female students. The final result obtained from the research is the existence of a significant difference between grade level and self-regulated learning skills.
Top1. Introduction
With the impact of Covid 19 in the world, online education has begun to be seen as a necessity rather than a choice. In fact, the sector most affected by the Covid 19 epidemic was seen as the education sector after the health sector (Yamamoto & Altun, 2020). This influence has revealed the fact that online education is of vital importance in the realization of educational activities.
Online education is a system that supports individual teaching and requires the learners to be responsible for their own learning process. For this reason, students in online education system are expected to develop their learning to learn skills, plan and control their own learning process (Karagöz, 2021; Karagöz, & Rüzgar, 2021).
Since online education is one of the most dynamic and enriched forms of learning available today (Ergül, 2006), it draws attention as a preferable education method. The prevalence and increasing importance of online education makes researches on the effectiveness of online education more necessary than before. Therefore, while talking about the effectiveness of online education, the subject of self-regulation skills in the online education process is among the leading topics expected to be researched.
Self-regulation is the personal skills that students have to develop in order for their success to emerge, and these skills can be expressed as abilities that can be thought, learned and controlled (Çiltaş, 2011). Self-regulation skills are re-emerging as a factor that needs to be examined in online education, when viewed in terms of learning environment and learning style, unlike face-to-face education. Self-regulated learning requires students to regulate their emotions, thoughts and behaviors and systematically manage their own learning processes in order to reach their goals (Cabi, 2015). In this research, it is examined how possible it is for teacher candidates to develop self-regulation skills for themselves in terms of online education, which is a different learning environment from the face-to-face education environment.
1.1. Online self-regulation
Self-regulated students are individuals who determine the objective closest to them, meet the necessary criteria to achieve this goal, observe themselves in this process, and evaluate the whole process as a result of their performance, and can organize their future learning processes with regard to these results (Zimmerman, 2000). It was predicted that students with high self-regulation would be more successful in autonomous learning environments (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2004; Hartley & Bendixen, 2001). Barnard et al. (2009) argued that self-regulated learning skills are important for success in traditional or face-to-face learning environments, but these self-regulated learning skills may play a more important role in online learning environments. It has emerged with the literature review that self-regulation and self-regulated learning form the basis of online self-regulation. Below are the explanations of the concepts of self-regulation and self-regulated learning, respectively.