<p>Due to the coronavirus crisis, universities worldwide have faced sudden pressure to change from face-to-face delivery of courses to digitally enhanced teaching for distance learning. We present a small case study of 75 students from the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics of the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece on their experiences of the transition from face-to-face to distance learning during this crisis. We used a questionnaire with closed-ended and open-ended questions to record the students’ “fresh” experience of their new educational reality. Students consider distance learning to be interesting, modern, adequate, and convenient, but not able to replace their experience of social interaction with fellow students and teachers. They continue to express worries about lessons, examinations, and laboratory work, which may be due to the specific and high demands of the biosciences. This crisis is an opportunity for universities to improve the use of digital tools for an enhanced learning and teaching experience. This should be supported by investment in digital infrastructure for improving distance learning in higher education.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0622/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

The aim of this paper is to highlight University Pedagogy as a field that focuses on academics' teaching role in Greek higher education. EU has recognized the need of improvement of the teaching skills of academics and urges the member states to recognize them as an important element of their professional profile. Only recently academics in Greece have launched the debate on innovative teaching and learning methods and practices. A Symposium that took place in 2016 and a significant empirical research are presented, because they are considered to mark the beginning of an emerging university culture, which incorporates the concern on teaching and learning excellence within higher education approaches in our country. The results of these initiatives indicate that critical self-reflection on teaching can lead to the transformation and to the adoption of alternative teaching practices, since the critically reflective process is a crucial point for the enhancement of an academic's pedagogical, curricular and instructional knowledge.

In this small scale study in higher education, a good educational practice on the teaching of Bioethics based on transformative learning and accomplished by debates is presented. The research was carried out in June 2016 at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece and it includes the assessment of the debating experience by the students participating in the course. The research followed the qualitative method and data was collected by free association through a single question posed to students, asking them to critically reflect on their debating experience. Content analysis was used for analyzing their responses. Debates seem to be a good practice for teaching Bioethics, since it leads to transformative learning for the future scientists, as it is highlighted by the students' views. They strongly state that they were highly interested and motivated by their participation in debates, an active teaching method that promotes the development of critical thinking, questioning, processing and presentation of scientific data, as well as the improvement of communication and cooperation skills. The most significant finding, though, was the critical reflection that young students reached regarding the subtle, difficult ethical issues of Biosciences.

COVID-19 pandemic has affected many aspects of social and economic life, including the educational sector. While each level of education faces its unique challenges, for the Higher Education the pandemic may act as the catalyst triggering a learning revolution. In the current study, which took place in April-May 2020, in the middle of lockdown in Greece, students from two regional Universities in Greece who participated pointed out that the Covid-19 pandemic disturbed their studies, even though their institutions managed to turn very quickly and successfully to distance learning. Despite the fact they are both old enough to handle the online work and technologically savvy enough to navigate new, digital tools and methods, a lot of anxiety, doubts and concerns arose. The main finding is that Greek students found it difficult to handle the lack of the everyday campus life and interaction with their fellow students and teachers, a lesson learnt for faculty to add pedagogically interactive tools, experiences, and ideas to stimulate students’ learning engagement.

Due to the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the institutions of higher education had to transform their educational function from face-to-face to e-learning. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of e-learning and the consequent disruption of the traditional educational function in higher education in Greece with special reference to the views of undergraduates compared to those of their peers collected via the same method and tool one year earlier in two regional Greek Universities, the University of Patras and the Democritus University of Thrace. The present research was conducted in May 2021 in order to explore students’ views and feelings one year after the sudden and total transition to online teaching during the pandemic. The results suggest that students seem to prefer face-to-face courses, but they provide interesting aspects regarding e-teaching and learning -thus valuable guidelines for higher educational institutions in developing didactic approaches, to motivate students on their academic pathway, emphasizing the necessity of University Pedagogy.