Online Education During COVID-19 and Beyond: Opportunities, Challenges, and Its Future—The Greek Perspective

The pandemicEducation during COVID-19 of Coronavirus has been a global phenomenon and has operated as a catalyst for several changes in various facets of human activity like medical services, businessBusiness, and trade. Education has been another field where COVID-19COVID-19 had initially adverse impacts including the full range of education from kindergarten to university educationUniversity education. The precautionary measures of social distancing have put aside the traditional educational model where a teacher and his studentsStudents coexist and interact, being physically in the same class. However, the star of online and distance educationDistance education has risen under these new learningLearning diary conditions having been considered at first as a necessity for this pandemicPandemic and any other possible pandemics of the future. This health crisis had a duration of more than 3 years from the beginning of 2020 up to the moment of writing this chapter amid the first semester of 2023. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020 and declared the end of the Covid global public health emergency in May 2023. There are officially recorded 765 million confirmed cases and 6.9 million deaths reported up to the middle of May 2023 (United Nations. (2023, May). WHO chief declares end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/05/1136367 ). All the above compose why everyone considers this pandemicPandemic as a cornerstone dividing our life in pre-, Covid, and post-Covid era. The massive exploitation of online educationOnline education during this COVID-19COVID-19 period has different characteristics per country since it embraces various parameters like average educational level, average internet penetration, technological infrastructuresTechnological Infrastructure, gross domestic product (GDP), etc. The present chapter examines the developmentDevelopment of online educationDevelopment of online education internationally in three different stages, before, during, and after the pandemicPandemic. The most important elements concern the developments during the pandemic that were designed to overcome obstacles in everyday educational functions. Furthermore, this study examines possible scenarios for the exploitation of lessons learned during that crisis about online educationOnline education in the post-COVID- 19 era. The special focus is on the course of Hellenic Open UniversityHellenic Open University, the most modern, newly created Greek university that is based more than other Greek universities on online education independently of the pandemic. This case study is used as a pilot for Greece since concerns the institute that at least theoretically is the most prepared among all to confront such difficulties and should be the country’s pioneer in open, distance, and digital educationDigital education (ODDE).