In recent years, several studies have been carried out into the reasons why students drop out of online higher education, following the rise in the relative weight of this form of education. However, more effort has gone into analyzing the causes of this phenomenon than into trying to characterize students who drop out, that is defining what a…

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted to examine the root causes leading to student dropout at a Greek distance education university. Data was gathered from two different courses--an undergraduate course leading to a Bachelors degree in Informatics (characterized by high dropout rates), and a postgraduate course leading to a Masters…