Abstract:

Distance learning is an approach to education that has exhibited a significant demand in the last years. The need for distance education, either undergraduate or graduate programs, has emerged due to several circumstances. It was the COVID pandemic, busy everyday schedules, economic issues and the geographical distribution of students and universities that boosted the distance education approach. In this new era for teaching and learning opportunities, it was necessary to record the attributes, distance education opinions, teaching and learning preferences of the students. This investigation focused not only on the students but also on the fellow students and their instructors. In order to succeed in recording all these data, a structured questionnaire survey has been designed and implemented. Fifty-one students from Serbian Universities responded and their answers were statistically analyzed. Female participants were the majority with almost 55% of the sample, and the age of most of the participants ranged among 20 to 22 years old. Almost all the participants are single and at the moment of the questionnaire survey studied in undergraduate programs. Students attending distance education programs prefer smaller groups of students (<30) and the like listening to the course material and taking notes. They are particularly fond of experimenting and focusing on one thing at a given time. It is very interesting that they particularly like to work independently on projects. The study also identified a number of interesting correlations.

Keywords:

Serbian Students, Distance Education, Learning Preferences, Teaching Preferences.