DISTANCE EDUCATION AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN ADULT EDUCATION DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: VIEWS OF POSTGRADUATE STUDENTS IN HELLENIC OPEN UNIVERSITY, GREECE

Abstract

Distance education has always been an important pillar of Hellenic Open University, through which undergraduate, postgraduate, and short programs’ students participate in. Before the pandemic crisis education in HOU had been characterized as synchronous and asynchronous with a choice of face-to-face classes. Under the new circumstances, due to the pandemic crisis, a lot of educational institutes all over the world had to adjust and offer a flexible synchronous and asynchronous electronic way of learning. This new, unprecedented situation came up as an emergency, as well as an opportunity, not only for the students, but also for the institutions so that they could evolve electronic distance education with the use of communication and collaboration online platforms. In this regard, HOU modulated the teaching in electronic form with the basic tool of teleconference for the group meetings and exams electronic platform. In this paper, there has been an attempt to research about the students’ satisfaction level, concerning the group meetings and exams changes, the main difficulties they dealt with, in which way their smooth attendance was influenced, and finally their agreement level about ways to reinforce their digital education in HOU with suggested ways deriving from literature. The conducted survey was quantitative out of 125 participants’ sample, with the use of a personal online questionnaire. It was found that the majority of participants had been satisfied with the changes in HOU, mainly with the communication they had with the counselor-teacher in online group meetings. Moreover, their attendance remained undisturbed, not only to their assignments, but also to their success in the exams, and regarding the difficulties they faced, their main ones were a feeling of stress or insecurity due to the unanticipated changes, a problem with their online connection and with the available time to answer the exams’ questions. It is also interesting their high level of agreement with the suggested ways to reinforce their digital education since the majority of the participants are in favor of those mentioned.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0099/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>