Abstract
Information communication technologies have undoubtedly affected the discipline of career counselling. Nevertheless, online career counselling remains a rather limited practice in Greece; therefore, the chapter attempts to contribute to the wider dialogue that has been addressed so far, by focusing on the design, implementation, and assessment of an online career counselling program for higher education students and graduates. The purpose of the study is to present the main parameters related to participants' learning experience, such as motivation, barriers to participation, as well as adopted strategies for overcoming these barriers during the online program. The researchers conducted 15 semi-structured interviews to collect data for summative assessment. The analysis of the data indicates that prior acknowledgement of learners' motivation, educator/career counsellor's role, the learning environment, the methods utilized, and the teaching material can maximize the effectiveness of equivalent programs, due to the fulfillment of their needs, goals, and expectations.
TopBackground
The study is grounded in four interdisciplinary fields; Lifelong Learning, Distance Learning, Instructional Design and Online Career Counseling. This section will briefly discuss dimensions of these disciplines, in order to form the framework of the present research.
The notion of Lifelong Learning can be approached as a twofold, because it reflects different epistemological and semantic background. On the one hand, Lifelong Learning is described as a process in which a person can learn new things, in new ways and for various reasons. Although this process seems to be an individual case, it is governed and guided by social or inter-subjective characteristics and factors that bring change both at the individual and the social level. On the other hand, Lifelong Learning seems to be outlined, in the post-modern era, through a variety of conceptual definitions, such as the empirical implementation of educational policy in western culture, the institutionalization of education throughout the life-span, as well as the perception that human life itself constitutes a learning journey (Karavakou, 2011).