Online course viewings and their effects on performances in COVID-19 distance education period

It is believed that increasing class attendance enhances class engagement and success ( Moores, Birdi and Higson, 2019 ; Wongtrakul and Dangprapai, 2020 ). Hence, minimum attendance requirement to classes is mandatory in most universities. While some studies support this fact, some studies have concluded that attendance does not affect course success ( Gomis-Porqueras and Rodrigues-Neto, 2018 ; Kaushik, Kumar and Kumar, 2021 ). Even if the students physically attend the lessons, they may not provide behavior engagement, emotional engagement, and cognitive engagement, which are three dimensions of class engagement ( Hu and Li, 2017 ; Qiping Kong, 2003 ). Compulsory attendance to the course may lead the students to attend the course without listening to the course, such as surfing the internet, and so this does not contribute to their success ( Nieuwoudt, 2020 ). Kaushik, Kumar and Kumar (2021) , stating that compulsory attendance may hinder academic success, defined the reasons for this as students wasting the interval when the course intervals are long, spending too much time on their way to and from school, and thinking that asynchronous courses would be sufficient for some courses. Some of these reasons do not apply to distance education. Because in online education, time is not spent going to school; the students can watch the lectures anywhere and anytime they want. So the effects of physical attendance on success can be different for online courses.

So far, the comparison of live and recorded lecture viewing is mostly about students’ preferences, and studies measuring their effects on academic achievement are limited ( Islam, Kim and Kwon, 2020 ; Howard, Meehan and Parnell, 2018 ; Trenholm, Alcock and Robinson, 2012 ; Nieuwoudt, 2020 ; Kahui et al., 2022 ; Le, 2022 ). In addition, generally studies in literature are limited mostly with schools or lectures. We want to evaluate student live and recorded course viewings, which are very important parts of the distance education system, especially in the Covid-19 period. We hope that this study will be beneficial for policy makers, education system developers and educators interested in online lesson viewings in

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universities’ distance education. This study is important for the evaluation of selected three courses in 13 universities. First we have seen that in the literature (For example: Shahabadi and Uplane, 2015 ), students have different perspectives for synchronized and recorded lectures. Hence, we classified our viewed classes in two classes as synchronized and live lectures. Existing studies indicated that based on gender, there would be some differences in distance education as well ( Gupta and Saks, 2013 ; Kahui et al., 2022 ). Hence, we created a category for gender. On the other hand, we have not come up with any literature regarding the differences in public and private university students’ interests in viewing the online lectures. In order to provide support to the literature, we also investigated public and private university difference in our study. Finally, whether students attend the final or not was the third category in our study. We also investigated the participants online class participation in all these categories specifically for Covid 19 period. Hence, we propose the following hypothesis.

The remain of this study continues with literature review. In the third section of this study, download and data preparation processes are explained. In the fourth section, analyzes and findings are provided. In this section, first of all, descriptive statistics about lesson viewings, and the distribution of student lecture viewings and entering the final exam are given. Afterward, we investigated whether there were significant differences in lesson viewings according to gender, type of university, and entering the final exam. Later, it was investigated whether the lectures’ viewing rates had an effect on final scores. In the last section, the findings were also elaborated.