Digital Divide Evaluation in High Education from Distance Learning Perspective

Digital divide is a term that refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology, and those that don’t or have restricted access. This technology can include the telephone, television, personal computers and the Internet. Well before the late twentieth century, digital divide referred chiefly to the division between those with and without telephone access; after the late 1990s the term began to be used mainly to describe the split between those with and without Internet access, particularly broadband. The digital divide typically exists between those in cities and those in rural areas; between the educated and the uneducated; between socioeconomic groups; and, globally, between the more and less industrially developed nations. Even among populations with some access to technology, the digital divide can be evident in the form of lower-performance computers, lower-speed wireless connections, lower-priced connections such as dial-up, and limited access to subscription-based content. The reality of a separate-access marketplace is problematic because of the rise of services such as video on demand, video conferencing and virtual classrooms, which require access to high-speed, high-quality connections that those on the less-served side of the digital divide cannot access and/or afford. And while adoption of smartphones is growing, even among lower-income and minority groups, the rising costs of data plans and the difficulty of performing tasks and transactions on smartphones continue to inhibit the closing of the gap. This paper examines the question of distance education and its pivotal role in promoting success, social change and development in Turkish education system in terms of digital divide concept. The case area is Izmir city which is the 3rd biggest city in Turkey. From started at the beginning of the twenty-first century, information technologies have been using at different levels of education; for example, the smart boards and tablets at high school level, distance learning at universities. Especially, distance learning is very popular in universities different levels of education. However, they have not the same chance to reach and use internet for their education. Some of the students only use the department computer laboratories and the others use owns cell phones and internet capacities in order to follow courses. This paper aims to discuss the differences from the perspective of digital divide concept. Different levels of university students are observed in Dokuz Eylul University, made questionnaires. One sample t-test, ANOVA and spatial statistical methods (weighted average center, weighted standard distance and weighted standard deviation ellipse) were used in the analysis of the data. In the evaluation of the results, the students were determined as gender and cities where they graduate as factor. Among the students, it has been found that men use information technologies more effectively than women who have information technologies. Additionally, results of the spatial statistics there is no digital divide between regions of country according to city where students graduated.