6th Teaching & Education Conference, Vienna

OPEN AND DISTANCE LEARNING IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF 21ST CENTURY CITIZENSHIP: A METAPHOR ANALYSIS STUDY

AYSUN GÜNEŞ

Abstract:

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of distance education in developing 21st century citizenship-which has evolved a lot with the developing technologies and their integration into everyday lives- through a metaphor analysis research which is a rare way of making researches in open and distance education. As metaphor analysis reveals most complex thought by only collecting words or phrases from people, it is chosen as the methodology of this research because interviewing or observing may be quite difficult for distance learning environments with quite a lot of people. For this reason, a MOOC is developed to train people from different backgrounds on 21st century citizenship. Learning for all is guaranteed with the use of a MOOC on 21st century citizenship without taking the learners age or gender background into account. In the data analysis part a triangulation method was followed by analyzing the metaphors of experts, MOOC participants and also the views and thoughts of these participants. The results of the study is quite promising in using Open and Distance Learning in the development of 21st Century Citizenship.

Keywords: Open and Distance Learning, 21st century citizenship training, metaphor analysis

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