Gifted Students and Teachers’ Perceptions of Distance Education Process in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of BİLSEM

The development of educational technologies has contributed positively to learning and teaching process by diversifying educational environments and activities. With the development of distance education programs, it has also become possible to conduct online and offline courses through distance education. Due to the measures implemented during the Covid-19 pandemic that emerged in the world and in our country, face-to-face education could not be provided at schools, and teachers and students benefited from distance education. The purpose of this study is to investigate distance education process of gifted students and their teachers at the Science and Art Center (BİLSEM) during the Covid-19 pandemic. A case study method which is one of the qualitative research methods was used in the research, and data were collected through interview questions. The sample of the research consists of teachers and students at Halil İncekara Science and Art Center in Nevşehir. Data were collected with a semi-structured interview and analyzed descriptively. According to the results of the research, the advantage of distance education process is an increase in the efficiency of using time, space, transportation, and technology. On the other hand, the disadvantages of distance education are listed as limited socialization, problems in activities that require practice, lack of technological infrastructure and hardware, problems in the Internet connection, difficulty in understanding the subjects, an increase in communication problems and lack of peer interaction.