Abstract:

Distance education as a notion appeared during the 1970s and over the years has taken many forms. However, it really emerged as viable alternative to traditional education during the Web 2.0 era (Nikiforos, Tzanavaris, & Kermanidis, 2020).
The delivery of quality education in a virtual academic environment that fosters student progression, development, and attainment is a fundamental objective of distance learning. Thus, there is a strong awareness that online education needs to become more robust in order to face the immensely complex and interconnected situations that make traditional educational processes harder. The reader could think for example the current pandemic, where the entire tertiary education level of countries was forced to move online, sometimes without the appropriate infrastructure.
In other words, for online education to become similar to traditional education, there is the need of not only the appropriate systems that will allow the transfer of the processes to the digital realms, but there is the need to design systems that will exploit the advantages offered by online systems and diminish the limitations of traditional face-to-face teaching.
The purpose of the current paper is to identify all those parameters and characteristics that will increase the probabilities of success for online education. To achieve the objective online educational programs were searched in four European countries (Greece, Italy, Romania, Serbia) along with scientific databases spanning a period from 2000 onwards.
For example, for Greece initial results indicate that it has by far the EU’s highest portion of students in undergraduate programs (86% v EU-27 average of 60%) , but at master’s level the share is only 10%. Moreover, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nikiforos, Tzanavaris and Kermanidis (2020) revealed that the (sudden) transition to an online/distance mode of education posed great challenges and difficulties as 40.6% of the teachers reported that had no previous experience in distance education.
Finally, Reimers and Schleicher (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020) reported that almost 20% of Greek students did not have access to a computer, a tool necessary for school work. The problem of insufficient resources is not only individual but affects the overall education system; Despite the efforts to update the digital infrastructure, the country lags behind the other European countries.

Keywords:

Distance education, COVID-19 pandemic, Critical Success Parameters.