ABSTRACT
The closure of educational institutions as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the transition from traditional face-to-face teaching to digital education. However, despite the growing academic interest in online learning and the use of new technologies in education, the body of work that addresses the cognitive particularities of online teaching experiences remains limited. This chapter introduces preliminary results of an ongoing study that aims to investigate the teaching experiences of 15 instructors engaged in online teaching with adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. By bringing together social and cognitive approaches, the study conducts qualitative in-depth interviews focusing on the teachers’ experiences of designing online courses, the technical difficulties associated with online platforms usage, as well as their perceptions of how students derive meaning and understanding during educational online interactions. Preliminary findings suggest that the absence of bodily cues in the online environment introduces a series of communication challenges. Specifically, digital learning seems to require additional cognitive resources during the teaching transaction, resulting in strategies of ’personalisation’ grounded mainly in visual cues in order to achieve states of joint attention and comprehension. Focusing on attention allocation during digital learning, the study provides new insights into the growing body of flow theory and online education aiming to inform innovative pedagogical strategies for digital teaching and learning.
