Lessons for a digital future from the school of the pandemic: From distance learning to virtual reality

The unexpected onset of the pandemic emergency placed so-called Distance Learning (DL) at the center of the academic world, affecting students and teachers across all formative steps. The DL experience has opened up the way for many queries in terms of research on the front of education, besides showcasing instances of innovation within the schooling institution, both increasingly urgent and no longer deferrable. The collective shock that started in March of 2020 was an opportunity to incentivize a leap in evolution, heavily digital in nature, within the educational system; howbeit, the generation of digital natives were already, prior to the onset of COVID-19, waiting to sense greater openness in the Italian school system toward newer technologies, in addition to less standardized, more innovative, creative and hybrid didactic formulas. In the presented study–a web survey launched in the spring of 2021–a large sample of students were invited to retrace their experience with DL, and express their relating assessments and reviews. Conducting the entirety of the study remotely turned out to be a winning data collection technique given a situation, comparable to the one experienced globally, in which face-to-face meetings had become impossible. Through in-depth analysis of the different contexts–social, cultural, technological, spatial, relational–in which the DL experience took hold, this contribution holds the purpose of illustrating the main DL adaptation profiles of the sample reached, valorizing the perceptual dimension, through the systematic comparison of online and in-person didactics. Analysis of the identified forms of adaptation created an opportunity to reconstruct the image of school that the interviewees held, how much they valued it, the trust they placed therein, the developments they predicted and desired for the institution. Focusing–responsibly, and taking stock of the possible ethical implications–on the future opportunities held by technological progress, in itself boosted by the pandemic, are located within a wider experimentation of VR-equipped classrooms, in a multidisciplinary perspective, offering a concrete solution to the needs of both students and teachers.