COVID-19 pandemic triggered distance education in higher education. Decisions such as isolation, social distancing and quarantine made by countries unexpectedly and suddenly forced face-to-face education to change to distance education within days. All academics around the world had to move online overnight. All the educational and academic activities in higher education (courses, exams, meetings, etc.) had to be conducted online in a few days. Based on these changes, this study aimed to analyze the relationships among student, faculty (adaptations of faculty members to distance education) and institutional (distance learning capacities of the universities) variables that affected satisfaction of the students related to distance education in higher education institutions in Turkey during COVID-19 pandemic using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). The study group included 14,962 students and 3631 academics from 30 universities. The results showed that universities with higher distance education capacities got higher satisfaction scores. HLM analysis showed that 43% of the variation in satisfaction scores resulted from universities. The second HLM analysis showed that 44% of the overall satisfaction score variance of the students could be explained by the factors of university features (Level 2: distance education capacity and acceptance and use of distance education systems of faculty members). Thus, it was determined that 44% of the university factor calculated as 43% in Model 1 (which is calculated within students’ general satisfaction scores) resulted from the distance education capacity and the acceptance and use of distance education systems of faculty members. The findings of this study provide insights to improve distance education by stakeholders of higher education institutions.

We investigated the correlation between leadership types and performance in different national cultural contexts and across sectors through a meta-analysis of 79 studies published between 1995 and 2020 using a random effects model. Although the analysis indicated that the type of leadership has only a medium-level effect on performance, our moderator analysis of the national culture variable found that the effect of leadership on performance was significantly higher in vertical-collectivist cultures, in healthcare and production and for the democratic leadership type. Our results also indicated a relationship between performance types and the effect of leadership on performance. As such our analysis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between leadership and performance in different national contexts and across sectors, in that national culture is an important moderator in the relationship between leadership and performance. Although only focusing on quantitative correlation studies, our work paves the way for more detailed qualitative research that can further focus on the nature of leadership and its relationship to performance in different cultural settings.

Despite the rapid increase in the number of scientists all over the world in recent years, very few scientists can achieve to be part of elite scientist’s category. Although there are many studies focusing on elite scientists, these studies generally do not focus on their childhood and parental background. In this study, which attempts to fill this gap, we focus on the cultural and economic capital of the families of elite scientists in Turkey and their parental support in childhood to analyze the roles of these variables in their being elite scientists. First, we assess the impact of cultural capital (institutional, objectified, and embodied), economic capital, parental support, and perceived academic success in basic education on the probability of becoming an elite scientist. Second, we analyze the differences among elite scientists to shed light on the gender gap in academia. We collected the data from 1,966 scientists working at 87 universities in Turkey through an online survey. Some of our main findings are as follows: (a) cultural capital, parental support, and academic success in basic education all have a strong positive effect on becoming an elite scientist; (b) objectified cultural capital has the highest impact in that an increase in this capital increases the probability of becoming elite scientists by 19%; (c) economic capital has no significant effect on elite scientists. Elite scholars have certain common characteristics, but significantly they are different from their average peers in terms of cultural capital and parental support and (d) elite female scientists have higher of cultural capital, economic capital, parental support, and academic success than elite male scientists. This finding supports the existence of the academic inequality and suggests that female scientists need higher cultural capital, economic capital, parental support, and perceived academic success to become elite scientists than their male counterparts.