Distance learning and training in digital environments, after their period of great prominence in the two decades from 1990 to 2010 and their subsequent shelving, much like the many technological products to be ridden for the moment and then abandoned soon after, experienced, and are still experiencing, in 2020, a period of intense interest and prominence, owing above all to the emergency brought on by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Recently, just when almost no one was talking about them any longer, the health situation brought that all-but-forgotten field back to the forefront of the debate over what teaching is possible in a moment of emergency, and of the concurrent need to carry on the school and academic year already under way.

The health situation forced the closure of schools, universities and training institutions in 138 countries, with over 98.5% of the student population unable to attend lessons or take part in in-person teaching (Ragusa, 2020). In-person teaching was replaced entirely by remote connection, and the digital environment was called upon to work around the problems tied to physical and social distancing. How was distance learning received by students and families? What happened to the school system? Did anything change compared with traditional teaching? What is the level of technological competence among students and teachers? Can we, then, speak of technological innovation in the way schooling is done? These are not easy questions to answer. In Italy, over the course of 2020, the theme of distance learning, known there by the acronym DAD, for Didattica a Distanza, dominated the political and social scene; and the aim here is to set out a few considerations on the meaning of something often presented as a product of technological innovation (which, precisely, it is not), and which nonetheless brings with it a series of problems that schools, universities and training institutions must inevitably confront.

First of all, a clarification of terms, as Miriam Di Carlo proposes in the online journal of the Accademia della Crusca: the clarification is indispensable, because the flood of terms risks confusing those who, on the contrary, want clarity and hold that the terms of the question also point to differences in the way we teach and learn. Tele-teaching, e-teaching, e-learning, telematic teaching, online teaching, digital teaching, digital school, smart learning, these are only a few of the dozens of terms in use, almost always referring to distance education, which has recently reunified many of the senses in which that kind of training is described: independent of the space and time of its delivery, and marked by the physical separation between teacher and learner (Bontempelli, n.d.).

In truth, distance education, in Italian, formazione a distanza, or FAD, was not born with the World Wide Web, but well before the advent of the Net. The new technologies gave a considerable boost to the creation of online training projects; and were one to retrace, briefly, the history of FAD, one would have to go all the way back to the letters written for the purposes of education and instruction (the epistles of Saint Paul to the Christian communities of his day), but that really would mean starting from a very long way off.

Returning to more recent times, it is by now a common and shared view to divide distance education into three generations (Calvani, Rotta, 2000):

• the first generation of distance education (which began around the middle of the nineteenth century) relied on transport and the postal services to deliver study materials to those who wanted them: it was teaching by written correspondence, aimed at an adult readership, favoured by the development of the railway system and marked by a one-to-one mode of communication; more recently, in the 1950s, the Scuola Radio Elettra in Turin became the most famous correspondence school of all, driven by mass schooling and the advent of electronics;

• favoured by the spread of radio and television, the second generation of FAD shifts towards a one-to-many mode of communication and a mass-media distributive infrastructure. Alongside radio broadcasts, a landmark Italian example of this generation was the television programme “Non è mai troppo tardi” (“It’s Never Too Late”), aired from 1960 to 1968 in the early-evening slot so that those who worked could watch too: through the teaching of the Italian language, the programme sought to heal the scourge of illiteracy, particularly widespread in Italy at the time (around one and a half million people managed to earn their primary-school certificate);

• the advent of computing, of the personal computer and of the Internet gave rise to the third generation of FAD, whose distinctive feature is that it adds to the one-to-many mode (already in place with the first two generations) a many-to-many mode of communication. This generation saw two quite distinct phases run side by side: the “off-line phase, based on the use of tools that do not rely on network support (floppy disks, cd-roms, dvds, access to downloadable materials), and the on-line phase, built on podcasts, tutorials and synchronous learning; the first more flexible, more customisable and more respectful of the student’s own pace, the second more oriented towards the formation of learning communities and often closer to traditional teaching.

Both of these versions of the third generation of FAD, offline and online, carry certain problems with them: it soon became clear that distance education is not the mere distribution of material, nor is it studying on electronic media, nor the transformation of a classroom lesson into an online lesson of the transmissive kind (in which the fundamental element of relationship is lost), even if it has become an important accessory to the hoped-for change, though not a decisive one.

How was distance learning received? An AlmaDiploma survey, carried out from May 2020 onwards in collaboration with AlmaLaurea, involved 246 schools and 73,286 students in the fourth and fifth years of upper secondary school, and looked into such themes as the use of personal computing technology, the effects of DAD, study load, the ability to concentrate, the effectiveness of DAD, students’ opinion of their teachers, the strength of family ties and fears for the future. From the survey (only 23,305 students responded), some interesting figures emerge: as regards computing equipment (PCs, tablets, laptops or smartphones) and the connection needed to follow lessons, almost all of those questioned (93.6%) reported having received no support of any kind from their school, relying solely on the resources available at home. The same goes for the effects of DAD in terms of study load, ability to concentrate and effectiveness of study. Some 79.6% of students reported that during distance learning their homework increased compared with traditional lessons. A little under a third of students (31.6%) felt it would be useful to go on using distance learning, alongside classroom lessons, even after the Covid-19 emergency. By contrast, 72.1% of students think that the preparation achieved through distance lessons is inferior to what they would have gained by going to school, and 42.8% of students feel they lack adequate preparation to face the coming school year or, for those in their fifth year, the maturità school-leaving examination.

What went wrong? To answer, we need to analyse the dynamics of DAD. The view that animated the recent experiences of distance learning seems to be that teaching is above all a matter of transmitting information: someone or something supplies information to the pupil, and that is how he learns. This is only one aspect of education, and not the principal one; and it is reductive to think that the new technologies have freed us only from constraints of a spatial and temporal nature: on the Net, it is the relationships among the participants in the learning process that must be valued. “The didactic power of telematics lies not so much in being able to replace the telephone or the postal service, or to provide an efficient system of mass distribution, as in its capacity to bring about new forms of collective interaction” (Riel, 1993).

In addition, in the field of the cognitive sciences, the years of the technological revolution witnessed profound paradigm shifts as regards epistemology. There was a move from an objectivist conception of knowledge to a constructivist vision: from a body of ideas that see knowledge as a truth, ahistorical, universal, unifying, transcendental, a priori, objective, independent, mirrored by a rational, autonomous, impartial, disembodied, objective mind, to a conception that regards knowledge as a product socially, historically, temporally, culturally and contextually constructed; in the field of research into the processes of teaching and learning, this shift led from an idea of teaching as the “transmission of knowledge and skills, through the metaphors of the ‘decanting’ of learning and of the notorious tabula rasa to be written upon” (Varisco, 1995) to a progressive recognition of the importance of the concept of learning over that of teaching, with a consequent centrality of the pupil and a learning process that is thus seen as the active construction, by the subject, of his own knowledge. It is by now well known how the communication we were accustomed to from the classic mass media, one-directional, binding, has little by little been joined by a two-directional mode of communication, in which interaction, sharing and collaboration emerge ever more strongly as essential constituent elements not only of a new form of communication, but also of a new form of learning, one fostered by the Net. Using technology to reproduce the frontal lecture, then, does not seem to be the best solution.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is in fact distinguished, in its novelty, by being (Calvani, Rotta, 1999):

• free of spatial and temporal conditioning, and therefore accessible everywhere and at any time;
• editable, that is, one whose messages can be retouched, modified, adjusted;
• reticular, with the possibility of many-to-many exchange;
• capable of expanding the community involved.

The advent of the Net thus entails modes of use very different from those of transmissive teaching, with the emergence of what Pierre Lévy, a long time ago, called “collective intelligence”, that of the electronic agora and of the learning communities, where “to collaborate means to work together, which implies a sharing of tasks and an explicit intention to ‘add value’, in order to create something new or different through a deliberate and structured collaborative process, as opposed to a simple exchange of information or execution of instructions” (Kaye, 1994). A constructivist vision of teaching restored hardware and software to their role as tools, since, as has been said, students need a technology that does not reduce them to consumers of information, but transforms them into producers of knowledge (Papert, 1994).

Distance learning in the age of the pandemic brought the new technologies back to the role of tool, but it forgot a whole range of possibilities offered by precisely those innovative teaching solutions, assigning to computers, tablets and smartphones the role of a communicative prosthesis that seeks to overcome the problems of spatial distance between the various actors in the educational process. It should be noted that technology was used, during the pandemic, to reproduce the school environment within an electronic one. The school, for its part, was unable to free itself of certain preconceptions and almost always tried to re-propose, through a new environment, the computerised one, many of the teaching dynamics traditionally used in the classroom; but the computer, as is well known, does not lend itself to duplicating the customary teacher-pupil relationship, in which there persist communicative strategies impossible to reproduce through a machine. Distance learning seemed an opportunity, an unexploited one, to promote that gradual change in the traditional conception of the roles of teacher and pupil. Over the last thirty years, in fact, a change of perspective in teaching/learning processes has been called for on many sides (but above all by Seymour Papert, the founder of computing applied to learning), advocating a student-centered approach and an educational paradigm that rethinks the primacy of teaching and replaces it with the conviction that it should be the pupil who is placed at the centre of the didactic process. In DAD, this takes on an even more decisive role.

Alongside the problems of a fundamentally mistaken vision of distance learning, one last consideration, no less important for coming last, concerns the possibilities of access to digital resources. Indeed, all the reflections set out on teaching methods and on the possibilities of learning must also reckon with the so-called digital divide. The acceleration towards teaching in digital form has thrown into sharp relief a marked gap between those who have effective access to information technologies (personal computers and the Internet in particular) and those who are excluded from them, whether partially or wholly.

Generally, three types of digital divide are distinguished: global, social and democratic. The first refers to the differences between more and less developed countries; the second concerns the inequalities within a single country; the third focuses on the conditions of participation in political and social life according to the more or less effective and informed use of the new technologies, in relation to how familiar users are with computing technology (agendadigitale.eu).

In an interesting article published recently in the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, it is observed how the pandemic has brought into even sharper relief the fact that “the possibility of accessing this kind of training is still not at all uniform across the world, and meets with significant obstacles”. For many countries it proves impossible to buy a computer^[1] or an Internet subscription (Ragusa, 2020). According to OECD data, in countries such as Norway, Austria and Switzerland 95% of students have a computer to use for study activities, whereas in Indonesia this figure falls to 34%. It is for this reason that a computer costing 70 dollars^[2] has recently been put on sale. The growing recourse to digital systems for education may accentuate the digital divide and its negative consequences, reducing still further the chances of personal and professional development for those without access to digital technologies, or without the skills to use them adequately. In Italy, the article continues, the picture from Istat, the national statistical institute, is damning: 6,175,000 Italian families have no access to the Internet, 24.2% of the total, and in 2019 the Internet was used on a regular basis by 74% of people between the ages of 16 and 74, a substantial figure but still significantly below the European average of 85%. The gap between North and South is considerable: 30% of the families that do not use the internet are in the South, in municipalities of at most 2,000 inhabitants. According to Istat, one family in three does not own a personal computer or a tablet, and 27.8% of inhabitants have difficulty connecting because they live in a large household and therefore face problems of overlapping use during connection: 45.4% of students aged 6-17 (equal to 3,100,000) have difficulty with distance learning owing to the shortage of computing equipment at home, which is either absent or has to be shared with the rest of the family (ibid.).

As if that were not enough, the shortcomings are not only technological and infrastructural, but relate also to levels of skill in use, on the part of both students and teachers: high-level digital competence is present in only 40% of Italian families (Ragusa, 2020; Istat, 2020). And so, on top of a methodological stumbling block, DAD also suffered from a problematic situation regarding access to tools and to information, further conditioned by poor digital literacy.

As Antonio Calvani rightly argued a long time ago, in-person teaching remains irreplaceable, and its place is unlikely ever to be filled by a machine. “The moment teaching extends onto the network, seeking to develop the learner’s autonomy and sense of responsibility, the knock-on effects make themselves felt on in-person teaching too” (Calvani, Rotta, 2000). Confined to one-way communication, the usefulness of the expository lecture will be greatly reduced (ibid.), and this appears all the more evident if the expository lecture takes place online. The network, in fact, offers a better and more articulated environment for the presentation of materials “rationally structured, modified, integrated on the network” (ibid.), and the purely expository lecture will end up diminished by it. But in this way the in-person lesson will bring out precisely those aspects the network cannot satisfy: not only the relational dimension, but also that of “helping participants to learn how to learn, dealing with the emotions of learning, developing critically grounded arguments, as well as getting to know one another and becoming acquainted quickly, learning to establish project agreements, carrying out specific experiences of situated learning (in the laboratory, or as apprenticeship)” (ibid.).

If we wish the world of the school to build teaching and educational settings oriented towards learning and creativity, we must identify paths that foster intellectual growth while bearing in mind also the social and cooperative dimension of learning. No one, in fact, can use technology to reproduce the real classroom just as we have always known it. The task of technology, in the field of education, is precisely this: to seek out new avenues of application and to try them out, according to a new vision of the computer as a medium. Learning, on the other hand, does not mean passively receiving what is usually meant by knowledge; it means, rather, discovering the active role that the pupil can play in the construction and co-construction of meaning.

One may agree with distance learning or not, but the new technologies hold the possibility of fostering a greater quality of learning and knowledge, rather than quantity; were the problems tied to the digital divide to be resolved, they could help to change for the better the traditional relationship between teacher and pupil, ensuring that education and training, against the backdrop of an ever-greater sharing of knowledge and skills, and of a growing constructive collaboration, and beyond being processes of self-realisation, are seen also, and above all, as moments in the development of social and cooperative values, where individual growth, through a better understanding of reality, can merge with the cultural and social progress of the school community.

References

AlmaDiploma, Indagine sulla Didattica a Distanza, 2020, https://www.almalaurea.it/sites/almalaurea.it/files/docs/news/ad_indaginesulladidatticaadistanza.pdf

Bontempelli S. Dall’istruzione per corrispondenza all’e-learning. Le tre generazioni della formazione a distanza, n.d. https://dinamico2.unibg.it/lazzari/0506idu/distanza.pdf

Calvani A. Rotta M. Comunicazione e apprendimento in Internet, Erickson, Trento 1999.

Calvani A. Rotta M. Fare formazione in Internet. Manuale di didattica online, Erickson, Trento 2000.

Da Rold C. Didattica a distanza: come l’hanno vissuta i ragazzi. Il sondaggio Almalaurea, 16 September 2020, https://www.infodata.ilsole24ore.com/2020/09/16/didattica-distanza-lhanno-vissuta-ragazzi-sondaggio-almalaurea/?refresh_ce=1

Di Carlo M. Didattica a distanza, in Italiano digitale, XIV, 2020/3 (July-September), Accademia della Crusca, https://doi.org/10.35948/2532-9006/2020.4367

ISTAT, Rapporto annuale 2020. La situazione del paese, Rome, presented on 3 July 2020.

Kaye A. Apprendimento collaborativo basato sul computer, “TD-Tecnologie Didattiche”, 1994, IV, pp.9-21.

Papert S. I bambini e il computer, Rizzoli, Milan 1994.

Ragusa A. La formazione al tempo del coronavirus: il nodo del divario digitale, “Il Sole 24ore”, 9 July 2020, http://scuola24.ilsole24ore.com/art/scuola/2020-07-08/la-formazione-tempo-coronavirus-nodo-divario-digitale-151905.php?uuid=ADmb9Ad&refresh_ce=1

Riel M. I circoli di apprendimento, “TD-Tecnologie Didattiche”, 1993, II, pp.18-29.

Varisco B.M. Paradigmi psicologici e pratiche didattiche con il computer, “TD-Tecnologie Didattiche”, 1995, VII, pp.57-68.