Abstract:

COVID19 has completely reengineered the ongoing educational programs. A great shift has taken place in the current educational system. Educators, instructors, professors, teachers are called to offer their knowledge through online systems and virtual classrooms. Students are no longer face to face with their instructors. Instead, they may be thousands of kilometers away. Therefore, the educational system has moved from its traditional form and caused changes to the requirements of the instructors that take part in distance learning educational programs. The current research agenda investigates distance educational objectives, distance educational students and their needs, adult learning theory, human and organizational limiting factors, implications for instructors. The current paper focuses on clarifying a number of teaching styles and then defining the ones that are adopted by Greek Instructors. An investigation has taken place during the last year to collect data regarding instructors and distance education within Greece. In order to collect relevant information a questionnaire was designed, and a following survey took place. The sample of the Greek University Instructors is equal to 158 responses. The responses were appropriately inserted into a database and were classified either as quantitative or qualitative data. The number of questions that the instructors answered was equal to 100. The survey was disseminated through email. The language of the survey was Greek and succeeded in collecting data regarding distance education experience, teaching styles, and the participants’ personality characteristics.

The findings of the current research indicate that instructors carefully choose to set priorities and then stick to them. Instructors like to be creative and spark creative ideas to students. They welcome team teaching and like to experiment with new teaching methods. Finally, this study will try to correlate the profile of the instructors with their preferences.

Acknowledgment:
The current findings of the research are part of the ODLEP research project (Optimizing Distance learning Educational Programs) which is co-funded by the European Union.

Keywords:

Distance Education, University Instructors’ Characteristics, Teaching Styles, Questionnaire Survey.