Abstract:

The proposed study focuses on Distance education. Distance learning and teaching has gained a lot of momentum during the last couple of years. Instructors are called to transform the courses from face to face towards online teaching. This transition is very challenging. The approach to teaching online is very different in comparison to face to face teaching. The whole process of online teaching needs to reengineer the traditional teaching process. The central person is the instructor. It is the person that orchestrates the educational process. In this context, it is necessary to examine the profile of the instructor. As a result, the current paper focuses on the instructors’ attributes, their teaching styles and at the same time the students’ learning styles. A structured questionnaire survey has been implemented. The survey managed to collect 63 responses from faculty members. The purpose of the questionnaire was to record the instructors’ profile, their teaching preferences and finally instructors stated their preferences regarding the students’ learning styles. All the collected data was inserted into an SPSS database. A number of statistical analyses took place. A core analysis was the crosstab analysis that revealed the correlations among Instructors attributes and teaching styles and their desired students’ learning styles. The analyses’ results presented significant associations among the stated preferences. In some cases positive correlations were identified among Instructors and Students preferences and in specific cases these preferences were expressed with the same degree of approval. Instructors that moderately have a preferred way of doing things and do not much like to do things in other ways are associated with students that moderately prefer tasks, projects, and situations that allow working with competing approaches, with multiple aspects or goals that are equally important. The study will be presenting representative correlations and descriptive statistics with emphasis on Italian university instructors.

Keywords:

Distance Education, Students Learning Preferences, Instructors Teaching Styles, Italian Instructors, Crosstab Analysis.