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Top1. Introduction
A global deployment of the Emergency Remote Education (Manca et al., 2021) has been a forced revolution revealing a huge need for improving knowledge and awareness on how pedagogical content is being taught online, as well as skills to design, facilitate, and deliver meaningful online learning experiences. The lack of specific skills related to designing online-learning-ecosystems literally exploded during the pandemic outbreak, revealing that the teaching professionals were not always trained properly to adjust their curricula to a full online setting (Daniel, 2020). The abrupt migration from face-to-face education to a total e-learning context, gave teachers a substantial awareness of the profound distinctiveness of online teaching (Rapanta et al., 2020). Conversely, in other cases like in universities, it was not infrequent that the challenge was perceived as an opportunity for pedagogical and professional reinvention of traditional approaches (Watermeyer et al., 2021). As a consequence, ICT integration and adaptative teaching styles are being defined as particularly relevant for early career teachers (König et al., 2020), while new needs have been emerging to ensure equity in assessment and institutional transparency for all stakeholders (García-Peñalvo et al., 2020). Similarly, different grades of students’ readiness to move totally online emerged, in high schools (Chung et al., 2020) as well as universities (Aristovnik et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the pandemic-related urgence for creating more resilient education environments imposed also the theme of educational sustainable models (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020).
In our digital society the term ‘online’ is no more a meaningful descriptor to define the ordinary experiences of digital native students, especially in those countries where Internet-connected devices are the norm, and the differentiations between educational time and other human activities are not so sharp anymore (Rapanta et al., 2020). Learners are fully immersed in new technologies and are also regular users of social media, hence they will advocate for the use of these tools inside and outside the classroom, this leads to less formal learning processes and to build relationships among the various agents involved (Sá et al., 2020). Aside from the continuous debate around technology and education, it is demonstrated that education practices hardly keep the pace with the latest technological innovations (Mayer, 2019). The strongest evidence of these different upgrading rates is the unsystematic adoption of Mobile Learning (ML) or m-learning (Grant, 2019) and the recent advance of 3D-virtual worlds, considered mature and appropriate for various pedagogical use. Despite their increasing appeal in educational practice, three-dimensional learning environments are still overlooked and disregarded by teachers, and the affordances of mobile computing devices have not been clearly explained. Due to instructors’ rapid skill obsolescence, lack of a proper instructional-design-background and even budget-issues of their education centers (Pellas et al., 2017) the educational outreach of these technologies is not entirely verified. As Zawacki-Richter and Anderson (2014) pointed out, e-learning experience is tightly tied to the benefits of choosing the most appropriate platform, and media features are of paramount importance in the Instructional Design (ID) process. They are related to the ICT literacy of instructors and learners and can impact the subject to be learned. Indeed, among the research trends of the recent years, technology-enhanced settings supporting communication and remote interaction are still one of the most cross-thematic focuses (Blau et al., 2020; Borokhovski et al., 2016). Along with the selection of the most appropriate medium, the current digital education paradigm is a stage of a theoretical evolution that may be traced back to the Behaviourist approach, then Cognitivist, and now Constructivist (Mayer, 2019), with a reasonably predictable advent of a dominant Connectivist perspective in the future.