Diadiktyaka mathimata kai siopiloi foitites

During the Covid-19 lockdown, all teaching staff and students in Greek Universities were forced to adopt a different way of teaching and learning by adapting to online courses. Silent students are seen as passive learners or even as having difficulty with basic thinking or lacking understanding. Research in online education highlights tacit participation as a critical factor that educators should take seriously. In this research, we studied the "silence" of students in online lectures at the University of Patras. The main purpose of this paper is to understand why a group of students remain silent in their online courses or lack verbal participation. At the same time, some solutions are proposed for more effective online chat/communication and to improve distance education. The study analyzed data obtained from questionnaires distributed to a sample of 100 students. The results showed that student silence was common in online courses. However, students reported three perceptions of the cause of silence, namely, student-related factors, teacher-related factors, and cultural factors. These findings add to the academic literature on engagement in classroom interaction and information about the various difficulties’ teachers have as they try to orchestrate discussions during their online teaching