Didatic Communication within Educational Digital Platforms during the Covid-19 Emergency: A Research in Higher Education

The communication maintained in the interaction environments of the digital platforms give access to the possibility of informal exchanges between teachers and students that go beyond the teaching activity. Online contact through Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom or WhatsApp and Telegram profiles between teacher and student are considered common social practices promoted by the speed and ease of these tools. The design and operation of digital platforms are not neutral and affect teaching activities by creating what are called third spaces (Potter and McDougall, 2017). In the perspective of the third space, digital technologies are not used as artefacts to deliver distance education, but to build a third and hybrid space other than both presence and distance, where the two initial spaces are enhanced and connected producing also emergencies (Rossi, 2019). The aim of the research is to analyse how the teaching relationship between the university teacher and the students changes within the educational digital platforms. The hypothesis of this research is that the informal communication channels between teachers and students (the so-called third spaces) contribute to the change of the teacher-student relationship by affecting also the didactic communication and its effectiveness. We interviewed 16 university lecturers and 32 students of different Italian universities and we involved 12 lecturers in two focus groups online to investigate what kind of relationships can be established on digital platforms and in particular how an informal digital proximity can affect teaching communication and its effectiveness. The results of our research highlighted how these third spaces can be intended as opportunities for individual and collective learning and training to be integrated with formal education activities at university level.