Περίληψη: | The educational collaborative virtual distance learning environment is supposed to promote
the active participation of teachers and students, interacting one another, exchanging
knowledge and creating new abilities. Consequently, the learning process is anticipated to be
promoted on both sides, by exchanging experiences, discussing new ideas and
accomplishment of group, thus allowing the creation of knowledge, based on the collective
involvement. On the other hand, in the context of eLearning, many standard software
platforms, so called portal servers, have appeared on the market integrating various and often
advanced synchronous and asynchronous collaborative tools and features. In this paper, we
conduct a preliminary analysis measuring the Hellenic Open University’s (HOU) students’
perceptions toward the educational portal’s learning tools focusing mainly on collaborative
activities. We make an attempt to identify whether the learners are using the portal, the tools
it provides and to what degree. The study takes into account a plethora of variables to
estimate whether these variables and at what degree are affecting significantly portal
usability. Apart from normal descriptive analysis, we furnish two different linear regression
models illustrating the various cross-dependencies among different dependent and
independent variables and conducting two disparate Analyses of Variance (one-way
ANOVA). |