Abstract:

Distance education has been gaining a lot of attention during the last years. Many academic institutions have invested in distance education programs and they have been offering both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Core participants within the framework of distance education are the instructors. In this context, the present study examines all the aspects of the instructors that facilitate the knowledge transfer. Therefore, the current research investigated the instructors’ views on distance education, their teaching styles and their preferred learning styles as far as their students are concerned. A questionnaire survey was used to collect responses from faculty members in Serbian educational institutions. Most of the participants were female, and also married. Almost 62% of the faculty members are professors and all of them work in state government universities. Almost 38% of the survey participants consider distance learning of average efficiency as a method of education. It is very interesting to note that almost 97% of the respondents prefer face-to-face educational methods. Survey highlighted a number of interesting aspects regarding teaching preferences and more specifically the results identified that educators very much prefer to teach in new ways and try new teaching techniques. Faculty members responded about the preferred learning styles of their students and almost 49% of the instructors suggested that they moderately prefer students that like tasks, projects and situations which allow working with competing approaches with multiple aspects or goals that are equally important. The analysis provided also a number of interesting correlations.

Keywords:

Instructors, Distance Education, Teaching Styles, Learning Styles.