INTERACTION IN DISTANCE LEARNING

The main purpose of this paper is to describe and identify the level of teacher-student interaction in the context of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemics in the universities of the Republic of North Macedonia. The paper presents findings on learning from a distance, discovers the weaknesses, the strengths and gives insights regarding the transition from the regular in-person teaching to online teaching. The study also has a secondary purpose to address students' satisfaction with online learning. Quantitative methods have been used to achieve these goals. The quantitative study was conducted with 312 students of the University of Tetova. The results of this study help to evaluate the effectiveness of interaction during on-line learning and provide recommendations on how educational institutions could increase the level of interaction during the process of learning from distance in order to provide high quality teaching. Based on the findings of this research, recommendations that could enrich the teacher-student interaction and provide a satisfactory distance learning are offered. Every educational institution should invest in capacity building related to online teacher-student interaction. Teachers should be provided with technical support that will help their performance during the teaching process, enable them to use their online communication skills and this will affect the emergence of a modern and contemporary teaching process in education. Students need to be trained for the use of different applications and online tools so that they can use them properly and benefit from these online services.