Education in the pandemic economy: attitudes towards distance learning as a drive of university students' decision making

Purpose Over the past year, the widespread pandemic has changed people's lifestyles around the world. Educational services providers had to adapt to this new reality. Therefore, distance learning has been widely used by universities all over the world, even though some institutions were not prepared for this sudden change to their service provision. As such distance learning methods, while they are not new in the academic community, were massively introduced and redesigned to help students' attend lectures and acquire new knowledge. The introduction of new technologies has further helped students' and teaching staff speed up the process and improve methods of teaching and learning, including access to educational material, virtual classes and live meetings. The aim of this paper is to tap on the new form of higher education provision in the pandemic economy; more specifically, the authors aim to assess the impact of this change on university students' and investigate the effect of attitudes towards distance learning as a drive of university students' decision-making. Design/methodology/approach Distance learning has been widely used by Greek universities, even though some institutions were not prepared for this sudden change to their teaching methods. To assess the impact of this change on university students, research was conducted on 1,550 students' at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, and a two-step cluster analysis was conducted to reveal three equally sized clusters, namely, technology mature, technology conservatives and sceptics of e-learning. Findings The results reveal that although students' found distance learning implementation the satisfactory, most of them are sceptical about the future of distance learning methods. Their main objections focus on the way distance learning is practiced. They also shared their objections regarding the future of e-learning and online exams. Originality/value This study is based on the extant pros and cons of distance learning and provides new knowledge on students' attitudes towards distance learning. This where the manuscript offers value, as to the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in the post COVID-19 era that offers new empirical data relating to attitudes towards online services provision in the higher education sector.