Empowering The Educational Procedure Through Interactive Educational Activities In Distance Higher Education

As the sole University in Greece that provides exclusively distance education in both undergraduate and postgraduate level, the Hellenic Open University (HOU) has set out a new strategy in the formation of its postgraduate programs, launching six new programs in the autumn of 2016, aiming to improve distance education in Greece. The main goal was to introduce a series of innovations in its curriculums, starting with these six programs, in order to improve the courses' quality and the students' distance learning experience. Towards this, an upgraded educational platform was used which consists a community of knowledge where students can interact and engage with the educational material. Based on this, in each of the six curriculums various digital and interactive educational activities were designed for the students, either close- ended or open- ended, which they can complete exclusively through the digital platform. The aim is to facilitate students to assimilate the educational material, develop their creative and critical thinking, exchange their views and experiences, in order to avoid the feeling of social isolation as usually observed in distance learning [1], and receive tutor's feedback about their responses helping them to engage deeper with the educational material [2]. In our research we explore students' views about their experience of dealing with these interactive educational activities and how the activities affected their engagement with the educational material. Therefore, a questionnaire was provided to the students of the six new programs where they could describe their experience and note their views about the improvements should be done. In this paper, the qualitative data of the participants' (N= 1026) answers are presented, from the first semester of the six new programs. The results describe students' views as well as their suggestions for future improvements and highlight the positive effect that the interactive educational activities had to students' learning experience.